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7 - Essence and individuality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2009
Summary
INTRODUCTORY: SOME INTUITIONS BEHIND THE DISPUTE OVER ESSENTIALISM
The doctrine of essentialism we find in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is a result of his analysis of change. Such a philosophy of nature, on the other hand, is a wholesale response to Parmenides' thesis that change is impossible, for if there were such a thing the principle of conservation of existence, that is, the ex nihilo nihil fit,would be violated. I have mentioned in chapter 1 that the Ancient Greeks held ‘nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing goes out of existence completely’ to be undeniable. In explaining how change is possible, Aristotle observes that such a thing is always relative, and that it never involves coming into being out of nothing. He declares that, among other things, it was Parmenides' own failure to recognize the distinction between substance and its attributes that led him to believe that earlier philosophers were committed to absolute change and thus to absurdity (Physics, i, 3, 186a28). Using today's corresponding notions, Parmenides had not discriminated between the object and the property inhering in it.
A second and related observation of Aristotle's is that the principles according to which substances and attributes change differ somewhat. We know from what has been sketched earlier that, accordingly, when an attribute is said to change, what was actually possessed by the substance recedes into privation, and is replaced by a contrary, that is, an incompatible quality emerging from privation. When substance itself changes, on the other hand, this means that the whole object is destroyed and another replaces it. The former occurs while the object itself persists, and is called alteration or qualitative change.
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- Object and Property , pp. 195 - 227Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996