Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Aristotle used the term "substance" (Greek: οὐσία ousia) in a secondary sense for genera and species understood as hylomorphic forms.Primarily, however, he used it with regard to his category of substance, the specimen ("this person" or "this horse") or individual, qua individual, who survives accidental change and in whom the essential properties inhere that define those universals.
Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians have employed the Aristotelian concepts of substance and accident in articulating the theology of the Eucharist, particularly the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood. In modern philosophy, an accident (or accidental property) is the union of two concepts: property and contingency.
For Aristotle, a "substance" (ousia) is an individual thing—for example, an individual man or an individual horse. [60] Within every physical substance, the substantial form determines what kind of thing the physical substance is by actualizing prime matter as individualized by the causes of that thing's coming to be.
Aristotle then considers, and dismisses, the idea that substance is the universal or the genus, criticizing the Platonic theory of Ideas. [ h ] [ clarification needed ] Aristotle argues that if genus and species are individual things, then different species of the same genus contain the genus as individual thing, which leads to absurdities.
The other things are regarded as the secondary substances (also known as accidents). Secondary substances are thus ontologically dependent on substances. [11] In Metaphysics, Aristotle states that everything which is healthy is related to health (primary substance) as in one sense because it preserves health and in the other because it is ...
Substance is that which cannot be predicated of anything or be said to be in anything. Hence, this particular man or that particular tree are substances. Later in the text, Aristotle calls these particulars “primary substances”, to distinguish them from secondary substances, which are universals and can be predicated. Hence, Socrates is a ...
In traditional Aristotelian philosophical terminology, material is not the same as substance. Matter has parallels with substance in so far as primary matter serves as the substratum for simple bodies which are not substance: sand and rock (mostly earth), rivers and seas (mostly water), atmosphere and wind (mostly air and then mostly fire below ...
Aristotle's "first philosophy", or Metaphysics ("after the Physics"), develops his peculiar theology of the prime mover, as πρῶτον κινοῦν ἀκίνητον: an independent divine eternal unchanging immaterial substance.