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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2009
All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal.
A. N. Whitehead Process and Reality 64 ([1929] 1969)Indeed, what has been sought after of old, and now, and always, and is always puzzled over, namely, What is being? is this: What is substance?
Aristotle Metaphysics Z 1028bTWO ARISTOTELEAN THEORIES
The first substance is the individual which can neither exist in another nor be predicated of another.
W. Turner History of Philosophy 133 (1903)… that which receives modifications and is not itself a mode …
“Substance” Oxford English Dictionary (1971)As we have indicated, the concept of substance has played a prominent role in the history of philosophy. Any attempt to provide an analysis of substance should be informed by an awareness of the efforts of the great philosophers of the past to characterize the ordinary concept of substance, and of the strengths and weaknesses of those efforts. As will become evident, our own analysis of the ordinary concept of substance is rooted firmly in one of the traditional approaches to understanding this concept. In this chapter, we will survey and critically assess several historically important attempts to analyze the ordinary concept of individual substance.
The first historically important attempt to analyze the ordinary concept is due to Aristotle, and states that a substance is that which can persist through change.
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