This paper focuses on two passages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, one in Z 3, the other in H1, in which Aristotle seems to assert that the hupokeimenon is said in three ways, as matter, form, and the compound of matter and form. From these two passages it is often said that subjecthood is a criterion for being substance. A consequence of this is that, if form is to be substance, and form is substance, namely first substance, it has to comply (...) with the subject-criterion. This paper challenges this reading, purporting to show that these two passages need not commit Aristotle to the subject-criterion, and that there are good reasons not to commit him to it. (shrink)

: Aristotle struggles with two basic tensions in his understanding of reality or substance that have parallels in Indian metaphysical speculation. The first of these tensions, between the understanding of reality as the underlying substrate (to hupokeimenon) and as the individual "this" (tode ti), finds a parallel in the concept of dravya in Patañjali's Mahābhāsa. The second tension, between the understanding of reality as the individual this and as the intelligible essence of the individual this (to ti ēn einai), (...) corresponds to an ambiguity in the concept of vastu in Kumārila's Ślokavārttika. (shrink)

It is the nature of the earth to lie ‘wholly spread out under the sky’: hapasê hê hupo tô kosmô keimenê (Isocrates); and the sky determines the World. Indeed it is the same as the World, as Plato states in the final words of Timaeus: ‘the World was born: it is the Sky, which is one and alone of its race’ (ho kosmos … gegonen heis ouranos hode monogenês ôn). What is thus clearly ‘one and alone of its race’ dominates (...) by its very nature what is subjected to it: the earth. With the coming of the age of modernity, and today more than ever, the West has indeed subjected the Earth and its peoples by imposing its World on them. But it is the nature of worlds, as it is of heavens, to be limited by a horizon; and there is no sky, nor world, that is not supported by an earth. By the Earth, we mean to say nature. This ancient certainty, this primary metaphor, has been inscribed in us since the first creatures to become human, standing with both feet on the ground and head turned towards the sky, first saw the horizon. As paleo-anthropology tells us, it is in effect in the same movement that they began to create technical and symbolic systems from which the ecumene would spring; and this prime metaphor that was the basis for the ecumene and its worlds has continued to work on the generation of secondary metaphors that govern the history of human thought through the unconscious - from Aristotle when, inventing the notion of subject, he called it hupokeimenon, ‘what lies below’ (as the earth lies below the sky), to Heidegger when he imagined The Origin of the Work of Art as a ‘dispute’ (Streit) between a world and the earth. Indeed there is Streit because the earth denies itself and withdraws into its interior, in the very exteriorization that opens it into a world. (shrink)

L’ambition de ce livre est de définir le projet métaphysique plotinien en prenant pour fil directeur la question de la (non-) articulation entre l’être et le substrat. Selon l’auteur, la métaphysique de Plotin se situe, sur cette question, en rupture avec celle d’Aristote, qui, dans son analyse de l’ousia, ne parvient pas à dissocier l’essentialité de la substratité : dans les Catégories, comme dans la Métaphysique, la substance assume ultimement la fonction d’hupokeimenon, et, comme le note...

This is a survey of Aristotle's development of the concept of substance in the Categories and Book VII (Zeta) of the Metaphysics. We begin with the Categories conception of a primary substance as that which is not "in a subject" -- i.e., not ontologically dependent on anything else -- and also not "said of a subject" -- i.e., not predicated of any item beneath it in its categorial tree. This gives us the idea of primary substances as ontologically basic individuals, (...) the fundamental subjects of predication and of change. We then examine the conception of substance in Metaphysics Zeta, where Aristotle is interested not just in the question of what the primary substances are, but in the question of what makes them substances, or, as he would put it, what the "substance OF something" is. The conception of substance that Aristotle ends up with seems (as has been frequently noted) to be threatened with inconsistency, in that Aristotle seems to want to maintain, simultaneously, that (i) substance is form, (ii) form is universal, and (iii) no universal is a substance. Two main approaches toward resolving this inconsistency are considered, and a sketch is provided of how one of these approaches might be fleshed out. On the line I propose, the substantial form of a material compound is predicated accidentally and universally of the matter of that compound, but it is not the substance of the matter of which it is predicated. Rather, it is the substance of itself; but since it is the cause of the compound's being essentially the kind of thing that it is, the substantial form is, in a derivative way, the substance of the compound as well. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III Bibliography.

Significant scholarship has been devoted to the problem of the incompatibility of Aristotle’s accounts of substance in the Categories and in the Metaphysics. Substance, in the former treatise, is that category of being distinguished from the other accidental categories by reason of the ontological dependence of accident upon substance: every accident must be present in a substance to be present at all. Primary substances such as “Socrates” are distinguished from secondary substances such as “human being” or “animal” since secondary substances (...) are said of primary ones. Only primary substances are neither said of a subject nor present in a subject, depending upon nothing else for their existence. This assertion of the ontological primacy of the individual seems to be withdrawn by Aristotle, however, in the Metaphysics, in which substance emerges in a discussion of the hupokeimenon—the underlying subject of which everything else is predicated. This subject is to be understood in three senses: as matter, as form, and as the composite of the two. Primary substance, finally, is granted to form alone, the “most perplexing” of the candidates, according to Aristotle, and the one that turns out to refer to the same thing as essence. Since what Aristotle means by essence looks to be a form common to all individuals of a particular species, it is not surprising that commentators identify at worst a contradictory theory regarding substance, and at best a transformation of an immature theory of substance into a mature one. (shrink)