The traditional conception of substance

The term ‘substance’ is one of the most confusing terms in philosophy. For Aristotle, at least some of the time, the paradigm cases of substances were, as he put it, ‘this man, this horse’, i.e. particular things of that kind. For complicated historical reasons, however, substance has sometimes come to be equated with what Aristotle called ‘matter’; thus iron and sulphur, and other stuffs, have come to be called ‘substances’. For further complicated historical reasons substance came to be regarded by e.g. Locke as the underlying something or other which is supposed to give support to the properties that inhere in it. Indeed the Latin etymology of the term ‘substance’ will suggest to anyone having a sensitivity to it that notion of something standing beneath the properties. Locke thus called it a ‘something I know not what’ – a suggestion that is not conveyed by either of the other two usages. The situation is complicated still further by the fact that the Latin etymology is relevant only to those modern discussions which rely on the term ‘substance’. The Greek word which Aristotle used – ‘ousia’ – and which is traditionally translated ‘substance’ has none of the suggestions that the Latin etymology of ‘substance’ provides, but has additional suggestions of its own, particularly a connexion with being.