Are There Aristotelian Substances?

Abstract

There is a broadly Aristotelian conception of substance, supported in various forms by Aristotle himself, and later by Ayers and Wiggins, which takes substance as the ontologically basic, absolute, persistent, unitary, irreducible, and individual subject of all predicates. This paper interrogates this account in light of the everyday intuitions which underlie it—metaphysical intuitions about the persistence of particulars over time, as well as semantic and linguistic intuitions regarding the practices of individuation and predication. After surveying some of the relevant literature on Aristotelian substance-theory, Foster argues that in its current state, the Aristotelian conception of substance is unattractively dualistic, as well as metaphysically extravagant. As an alternative, the paper argues for a modified “bundle-theory” of substance, which holds that Aristotelian substances can and should be understood as nothing more than structured matter with manifest “bundles” of properties. On this basis, Foster attempts to demonstrate that our semantic and logico-linguistic intuitions can be fruitfully explained and vindicated by a bundle-theory, while remaining agnostic about the richer metaphysics suggested by the Aristotelian theory.