Substance Ontology Research Articles

Two Ways to Particularize a Property

ABSTRACT:Trope theory is an increasingly prominent contender in contemporary debates about the existence and nature of properties. But it suffers from ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation reveals two fundamentally different concepts of a trope: modifier tropes and module tropes. These types of tropes are unequally suited for metaphysical work. Modifier tropes have advantages concerning powers, relations, and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes have advantages concerning perception, causation, character-grounding, and the ontology of substance. Thus, the choice between modifier tropes and module tropes is significant and divides the advantages of trope theorysimpliciter. In addition, each resulting trope theory is unstable: modifier trope theory threatens to collapse into realism, and module trope theory threatens to collapse into austere nominalism. This invites reflection on the stability of trope theory in general.

Sunyata and Otherness: Applying Mutually Transformative Categories from Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in Christology

Sunyata and Otherness:Applying Mutually Transformative Categories from Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in Christology Susie Paulik Babka “The universe is expanding,” the physicists tell us. “But doesn’t an expansion of something mean the presupposition of boundaries?” my naïve mind inquires, thinking too much in terms of discrete substances. Can “something” expand “into” nothing, “into” emptiness? Shot through with “dark energy” (the name an intellectual signifier allowing physicists to speak of the ineffable), the immensity of the universe teaches a lesson in humility before mystery and the radically new. Dark energy makes up 74 percent of the universe and is responsible for increasing the rate of the universe’s expansion; it may be explained as the energy of empty space, or space devoid of matter and gravity. Although an unobservable phenomenon, dark energy penetrates the known universe as that which counteracts gravity’s relationship to matter, causing a negative pressure in regions of the universe devoid of matter to expand. Hence, the energy of emptiness is the reason for the universe’s expansion; emptiness is the reason reality is better described by rapid change and impermanence than stasis and immutability. While it would seem that these developments do not impact religious thinking, the Dalai Lama and others have argued that because science helps us understand the nature of reality, it affects the paradigm in which we consider the veracity of religious ideas. In his words, “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”1 This is a bold statement, challenging both East and West to consider that when derived from only one source, even our most treasured religious ideas are narrowly conceived. The Western worldview has kept pace neither with the challenges of cosmic and subatomic physics nor with a more sophisticated global community. Since Parmenides in the pre-Socratic era, Western thought has been dominated by Greek philosophical categories, in which the perfection of beings is regarded in immutability and stasis, and things ideally tend toward independence or self-sufficiency. These categories [End Page 73] not only are inadequate to describe reality discovered through scientific means but also fail to articulate the meaning of the religious and cultural encounters taking place between East and West. Writes Joseph O’Leary, “The encounter with Buddhist thought enhances the hermeneutical task of theology, by opening up the possibility that Christian truth today can be more luminously presented in a discourse influenced by Buddhist analytical methods and ontological insights than in the old frameworks formed in dialogue with Greek ontology.”2 Deconstructing substance ontology in the West suggests not only that science is a valuable conversation partner to religion but also that religions be conversation partners with each other. Christians should consider how divine or ultimate reality is manifest in other religions and abandon claims to exclusive truth. As Joseph O’Leary argues, The religions need each other, whatever their utter self-sufficiency on the plane of abstruse theological claims. The religions, as human historical trajectories, are inevitably marked by incompleteness and tragic failures. The tensions between them are not to be suppressed by dogmatic self-affirmation, but to be interpreted as the tension of “truth” itself, making itself felt within the finitude and brokenness of the human language striving to express it.3 Truth for the Dalai Lama is “pursued by means of critical investigation,” requiring conversation with modern thought forms as well as both religious and secular Western traditions. If Christian theology is to be relevant today, it must continue to deconstruct the classical metaphysical categories that impede the appreciation of what is possible or true, especially in the encounter with non-Christian and non-Western thought, culture, and religious practice. Interreligious encounter necessitates the questioning of ontotheology, the classical metaphysical logic that refers to the rational basis for naming God, the supreme being, with supreme attributes, such as eternity, immutability, omniscience, and omnipotence. Ontotheology is related to the substance ontologies that describe the relation between God and the world and East and West in terms of dualism that according to Paul Knitter “so stresses the difference between two realities, so separates them...

Ontological metaphors for negative energy in an interdisciplinary context

Teaching about energy in interdisciplinary settings that emphasize coherence among physics, chemistry, and biology leads to a more central role for chemical bond energy. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to chemical energy leads to modeling chemical bonds in terms of negative energy. While recent work on ontological metaphors for energy has emphasized the affordances of the substance ontology, this ontology is problematic in the context of negative energy. Instead, we apply a dynamic ontologies perspective to argue that blending the substance and location ontologies for energy can be effective in reasoning about negative energy in the context of reasoning about chemical bonds. We present data from an introductory physics for the life sciences (IPLS) course in which both experts and students successfully use this blended ontology. Blending these ontologies is most successful when the substance and location ontologies are combined such that each is strategically utilized in reasoning about particular aspects of energetic processes.

How substance-based ontologies for gravity can be productive: A case study

Many science education researchers have argued that learners’ commitment to a substance (matter-based) ontology impedes the learning of scientific concepts that scientists typically conceptualize as processes or interactions, such as force, electric current, and heat. By this account, students’ tendency to classify these entities as substances or properties of substances leads to robust misconceptions, and instruction should steer novices away from substance-based reasoning. We argue that substance-based reasoning can contribute to the learning and understanding of these very same physics concepts. Our case study focuses on a group of elementary school science teachers in our professional development program. Starting from substance-based metaphors for gravity, the teachers build a sophisticated explanation for why objects of different masses fall with the same acceleration. We argue that, for conceptual, epistemological, and affective reasons, instructional interventions should focus on tapping these productive substance-based resources when they arise rather than attempting to suppress them.Received 6 May 2013DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.10.010113This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical Society

Temporality and Textual Engagement in a Middle School English Language Arts Classroom

Using Gadamer's concept of tarrying, this paper explores the impact of classroom temporality on students' engagement with text in an 8th grade English Language Arts classroom. Through an analysis of interactional data collected during two years of an ethnographic study of classroom activities, I show how reading strategies helped constitute and were constituted by a linear, dimensional temporality, within which text and reader were individuated and textual meaning objectified, characterized by an “ontology of static substance” (Ross 2006). In such cases, the act of reading was defined as a processual movement through or consumption of text, which could break down requiring strategies to restore the smooth flow. At other moments, however, interaction around text took on a tarrying temporality. These less frequent moments resonate with Gadamer's claims for the state of understanding associated with the experience of art, a “being moved” (2001:76), an “uninterrupted pure gazing” (2006:72) associated with the “absolute presentness” of art (2006:60). In classroom moments I call tarrying, students were more often engaged in an open‐ended, exploratory co‐construction of meaning with other participants, rather than producing items at someone else's request. Text was not possessed but, on the contrary, became something that took hold of participants and was jointly occupied or shared. Within such moments, reading strategies, usually decontextualized tools to be applied by an individual subject to a text, receded instead into the tarrying or “playing”—a “movement backwards and forwards” (Gadamer 1975:93)—of the immediate interactional context.

Representing energy. I. Representing a substance ontology for energy

The nature of energy is not typically an explicit topic of physics instruction. Nonetheless, verbal and graphical representations of energy articulate models in which energy is conceptualized as a quasimaterial substance, a stimulus, or a vertical location. We argue that a substance ontology for energy is particularly productive in developing understanding of energy transfers and transformations. We analyze classic representations of energy---bar charts, pie charts, and others---to determine the energy ontologies that are implicit in those representations, and thus their affordances for energy learning. We find that while existing representations partially support a substance ontology for energy and thus the learning goal of energy conservation, they have limited utility for tracking the flow of energy among objects.

Psychoactive Substances and the English Language: “Drugs,” Discourses, and Public Policy

This article undertakes a historical ontology of psychoactive substances, or, in other words, an exploration of the philosophical and political nature of modern categories for plants and chemicals that alter consciousness. Drawing on the ideas of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking and using the method of critical discourse analysis, I elucidate three distinct contemporary meanings of the English word “drug.” Further, I demonstrate how these meanings of “drug” map onto a modern stereotypology of psychoactive substances that informs public discourses and sustains an ideological drug war paradigm. I trace this paradigm through the generative metaphors of drugs as “malevolent agents” and “pathogens” in modern public discourses, and explore how these metaphors frame and support policy responses within the international drug control regime that are inconsistent with human rights. In so doing, I argue that the language we use to talk and think about “drugs” may not be ideal for crafting sound public policy.

Substance Ontology Cannot Determine the Moral Status of Embryos

Assigning the appropriate moral status to different stages of human development is an urgent problem in bioethics. Many philosophers have attempted to assess developmental events using strict ontological principles to determine when a developing entity becomes essentially human. This approach is not consistent with recent findings in reproductive and stem cell biology, including the discovery of the plasticity of early embryonic development and the advent of induced pluripotent stem cells. Substance ontology should therefore not be used to determine the moral status of the embryo.

Newton’s Neo-Platonic Ontology of Space

This paper investigates Newton’s ontology of space in order to determine its commitment, if any, to both Cambridge neo-Platonism, which posits an incorporeal basis for space, and substantivalism, which regards space as a form of substance or entity. A non-substantivalist interpretation of Newton’s theory has been famously championed by Howard Stein and Robert DiSalle, among others, while both Stein and the early work of J. E. McGuire have downplayed the influence of Cambridge neo-Platonism on various aspects of Newton’s own spatial hypotheses. Both of these assertions will be shown to be problematic on various grounds, with special emphasis placed on Stein’s influential case for a non-substantivalist reading. Our analysis will strive, nonetheless, to reveal the unique or forward-looking aspects of Newton’s approach, most notably, his critical assessment of substance ontologies, that help to distinguish his theory of space from his neo-Platonic contemporaries and predecessors.

Becoming a person: Hermeneutic phenomenology's contribution

Hermeneutic phenomenology sets out to describe human beings as they show up in “average everydayness,” prior to high-level theorizing and reflection. From this standpoint, human existence is found to be meaning- and value-laden, and so in need of interpretation in order to be properly understood. The description of everydayness leads to a critique of the “substance ontology” presupposed by many natural sciences, and instead characterizes a human being as an “event” or “life story” unfolding between birth and death. Working within this approach to understanding humans as events, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) gives an account of what he calls an “authentic” (literally, “proper” or “owned”) individual. This account gives us a distinctive way of understanding what it is to be a “person” in the fullest sense of this word. A person, on this account, is an individual who can assess her primary desires in the light of “higher” or “second-order” motivations concerning what sort of person she wants to be. As a participant in a social context, she is indebted to the historical tradition of a community for her possibilities of self-interpretation and self-evaluation. In a social context, she can be a “respondent,” answerable for what she does. And she is equipped to be an effective moral agent in facing situations demanding decisions. An authentic individual or “person” has a kind of freedom that makes meaningful choice possible.

ISPC 2007 third editorial

The papers by Joseph Earley, Klaus Ruthenberg and Rom Harre are the last to be published from the 2007 International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry Symposium held at the University of San Francisco. The previous papers from the symposium can be found in Foundations of Chemistry v11.1 and v10.3. Together these three papers form a conversation on the epistemology and ontology of element and substance, a subject of on-going interest to philosophers of chemistry. Earley and Ruthenberg, two well-known chemist-philosophers, directly engage one another on the use of the terms ‘einfacher Stoff’ and ‘Grundstoff’ by Fritz Paneth (an important early twentieth century chemist-philosopher). Earley uses a linguistic framework to dissect Paneth’s terminology and explicate its polysemic underpinnings. Translated as ‘simple substance’ and ‘basic substance’ respectively, he suggests that these provide ‘‘alternate meanings of the term element’’, where einfacher Stoff is an element in the Lavoisierian sense, while Grundstoff encapsulates the conceptual notion of an element (i.e., within a compound, bound to other elements) that chemists actually use, and is therefore not ‘a substance’ in either the vernacular or philosophical sense. To prove this he tracks the etymological progression of the word ‘substance’ from Aristotle onward, ultimately proposing that einfacher Stoff be translated into ‘elementary substance’ and ‘element’ be ‘‘available for exclusive use as an English translation of Grundstoff’’. While Earley separates Paneth’s philosophical understanding of element and substance from Kant’s transcendental schema of phenomena and noumena, Ruthenberg argues that Paneth’s philosophy is directly grounded in Kant’s epistemology and that therefore a linguistic analysis is insufficient. By reframing einfacher Stoff as observables and Grundstoff as non-observables he tracks Paneth’s shifting conception of element/substance from that of the purely phenomenological (1916) into the realm of the transcendental (1931). Once tied to Kant’s philosophy, Ruthenberg untangles the intricacies of the connection by showing that whereas Paneth’s empirical view on simple substances does not, in fact, quite square with Kant’s (as expressed in the Critique of Pure Reason), his notion of basic substances as ‘‘theoretical concepts rather than existing things’’ accords well with

The Concept of Time According to Thomas Aquinas

The article explains Thomas Aquinas’ concept of time on the basis of his metaphysics of being. At the same time, it shows the distance between his concept and the Aristotle’s conception of time, despite the fact that, formally, both thinkers used the same definition of time. The article analyzes the main elements of this definition through their interaction: time, motion and human soul. The journey from the Aristotle’s ontology of substances (υοσία) to the Thomistic metaphysics of the act of being (actus essendi) uncovers the unity among between motion, human soul and the acts of being of time. Nurtured by the act of divine creation, time appears as a tension, as the human soul itself, which ‘measures’ the ontological movement of a being and makes continuous its continual moments of beginning, by adding the dimensions of past and future.

Julian Wuerth - Kant's Immediatism, Pre-Critique

Kant's Immediatism, Pre-Critique Julian Wuerth As the author of a copernican revolution in philosophy, 1 Kant argues that philosophy begins with the study of the self. 2 To grasp the scope and nature of [End Page 489] knowledge in natural science, ethics, and aesthetics, we must first understand the self and its faculties of representation, pleasure, and desire, respectively. 3 While the literature acknowledges the foundational role of Kant's account of the self in his system of philosophy, it typically focuses on Kant's isolated conclusions about a priori concepts, or on the ontology of the self solely as Kant presents it in his rejection of rational psychology. The result is a gap in the commentary. The place of these conclusions in a single, broader account of the self, and the positive ontological status of this self, remains largely a mystery. These shortcomings are related: Kant's account of the ontology of the self provides the background for understanding the unity and interrelations of the many different powers of the self and their accidents, including a priori concepts. [End Page 490] A recent spate of literature on Kant's account of the self addresses important components of this account but perpetuates some traditional methodological weaknesses. The often original commentaries by Patricia Kitcher, Thomas Powell, and Wayne Waxman stick to frontline issues such as Kant's Paralogisms, his accounts of different faculties of representation, and his Transcendental Deduction, for example; they do not examine Kant's underlying positive ontology of the self, his more general ontology of substance, powers, and accidents, or the other faculties that Kant ascribes to the self. 4 This traditional orientation reflects a problematic research methodology: these accounts do not consider any of Kant's voluminous recorded thought from before the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), even though Kant published the Critique when he was already fifty-seven years old, after decades of detailed, systematic, and largely consistent studies of the self. These interpretations instead rely almost exclusively on the Critique and rarely even consult Kant's many other post-1781 sources. They accordingly focus on the faculties highlighted in the Critique, namely the various faculties of representation and not the faculties of pleasure or desire, and they take the Critique's pithy and notoriously cryptic chapter on the Paralogisms as a full statement of the soul's ontology. Unfortunately, the Paralogisms present only a negative account of the soul's ontology, not a complete one. These interpretations therefore understand Kant's rejection of [End Page 491] the intemperate rationalist arguments—which hold that the conclusions of the soul's simplicity and substantiality imply the soul's permanence, incorruptibility, and immortality—as Kant's rejection of all ontologically significant conclusions of the soul's substantiality and simplicity, even more temperate ones that do not imply the soul's permanence, incorruptibility, and immortality. Although these interpretations—united in their view that Kant rejects the substantiality of the soul in any ontologically significant sense—may at first seem viable if we consider only the Paralogisms, a closer look at the Paralogisms reveals significant problems, a look beyond the Paralogisms shows that these interpretations are repeatedly contradicted, and application of these interpretations when approaching other doctrines in Kant's philosophy repeatedly leads us down dead-ends. Thus Kant states in the Paralogisms, and in many other places after the Critique, that the soul is a substance, understood in the most basic ontological sense of the pure category of substance. 5 And Kant claims that the soul has powers and accidents, while at the same time repeatedly making clear that accidents (unlike mere logical predicates) are a form of existence and that all existence is grounded in substance, either being substance or a determination, or mode, of substance. Without Kant's concept of noumenal substance, his concepts of the soul's accidents and powers are rendered incoherent, frustrating our understanding of many other Kantian doctrines, including Kant's critique of rational psychology...

Garber’s Interpretations of Leibniz on Corporeal Substance in the ‘Middle Years’

In 1985 Daniel Garber published his highly intluential paper and the Founda­ tions of Physics: The Middle Years. In two recent articles, Garber returns to these issues with a new position - that we should perhaps conclude that Leibniz did not have a view concerning the ultimate ontology of substance during his middle years. I discuss the viability of this position and consider some more general methodological issues that arise from this discussion. I t is twenty years since Daniel Garber published his highly influential paper and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years (Garber 1985). In that paper Garber advocated an interpretation ofLeibniz's views concerning body and substance that has been subject to much discussion and debate. As a result of that discussion, Garber's position has changed somewhat and in two recent ar­ ticles, and Fardella: Body, Substance and Idealism, (Garber 2004) and and Idealism, (Garber 2005), he has returned to these issues with a fresh and, what I imagine will be, an equally provocative approach. Garber 2004 is partly autobiographical and I'll rely on Garber's account of his own progress when providing my analysis of the debate and the lessons that we can learn from its current state. I'll suggest that some elements in Garber's characterization of the debate may not be entirely accurate and clarification will certainly be one of my aims. But I want to discuss two further issues. As will become clear, a feature of Garber's current position is that we should perhaps conclude that Leibniz did not have a view concerning his ultimate ontology of substance during his middle years. I will be interested in the viability of this position. But I'll also explore some more general methodological issues that arise from Garber's willingness to embrace this kind of agnosticism on Leibniz's behalf (albeit tentatively). Finally, I want to return to an important and perennial aspect of Garber's views on body and corporeal substance that is somewhat downplayed in his most recent articles. I think this deserves greater attention and that such attention may lead to more

Saving Whitehead’s Universe of Value

Saving Whitehead’s Universe of Value

O conceito de categoria ontológica: um novo enfoque

O artigo oferece um novo enfoque do conceito de categoria ontológica. O ponto de partida é a afirmação de que as "ontologias da substância" baseiam-se na aceitação do Princípio da Composicionalidade Semântica, o qual se mostra ter implicações ontológicas inaceitáveis. Este artigo delineia uma nova semântica baseada no Princípio de Contextualidade Sentencial (ou Princípio do Contexto) e, em concordância com ele, uma nova ontologia. A partir desse princípio uma nova categoria semântica denominada "estado de coisas primário" ("primestado", de forma abreviada) é derivada, e é mostrado que sobre essa base é possível desenvolver a categoria ontológica fundamental e, em um sentido, única chamada "fato primário" ("primofato", de forma abreviada).

The Tao Encounters the West: Explorations in Comparative Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: The Tao Encounters the West: Explorations in Comparative Philosophy Qingjie James Wang (bio) Chenyang Li . The Tao Encounters the West: Explorations in Comparative Philosophy. Edited by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. xii, 234 pp. Hardcover $59.50, ISBN 0-7914-4135-0. Paperback $19.95, ISBN 0-7914-4136-9. This book is a competent, scholarly comparative study of several important philosophical issues such as being, truth, language, morality, rights and duty, religion, and democracy. It offers a critical comparison of the fundamental positions held by major thinkers of both the Chinese and Western traditions—for example Zhuang Zi, Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Aristotle, Heidegger, Kripke, feminists, and liberal philosophers. On the basis of this comparison, Li concludes that although different value systems are incompatible or even contradict each other in their ontological and logical grounding, they can to some extent still coexist and complement each other. The book has seven chapters that can be divided into two parts. The first three chapters deal with questions that are of a more theoretical nature. In the last four, Li attempts to answer the question of whether the theoretical differences in ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of language could and should affect our attitudes with regard to value, family responsibility, religious beliefs, and politics. Chapter 1 compares the "substance ontology" of Aristotle and the "contextual perspective ontology" of Zhuang Zi. According to Li, "substance ontology" holds that "for each individual entity (or at least a natural entity), there is only one essence and one primary being" (p. 14). In contrast, Zhuang Zi's "contextual perspective ontology" views things at two levels: the level of Tao and the level of entities. At the level of Tao, "Everything in the world has its root in the Tao. In this sense, all are One" (p. 15). At the level of entity, "each individual entity can be both a 'this' and a 'that.' An entity's being a 'this' does not exclude its also being a 'that'" (p. 15). These two levels are related in such a way that "an individual's being a 'this' and being a 'that' are ways of the Tao's presenting itself" (p. 15). Li uses Zhuang Zi's well-known stories of the ox and the butterfly to illustrate his point. Then he concludes that "to say an entity is essentially or primarily a man or a butterfly is already to be misled. For him [Zhuang Zi] an entity can be both a 'this' and a 'that'; it may remain the same entity while transforming from one category into another" (p. 29). Because there is no substantial essence in an entity as the primary being, as Aristotle claims, there should be no single objectively right answer to the question of what, essentially, an entity is. This leads to the question of the essence of truth, which is the main topic of chapter 2. In this chapter, Li starts with a discussion of Heidegger's criticism of [End Page 165] the correspondence theory of truth, which is traced back historically to Aristotle. According to this theory, Li says, "the essence of truth lies in the agreement of the assertion with what is being asserted," that is, "with an object or reality" (p. 37). Heidegger challenges the Aristotelian substance ontology and the Cartesian dichotomy of subject/object as the grounding of the correspondence theory of truth. In Heidegger's view, "truth cannot possibly have the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a likening of one entity (the subject) to another (the object). Correspondence between the statement and the thing cannot signify a thing-like approximation between dissimilar kinds of things" (p. 37). Rather than the correspondence theory of truth, Heidegger proposes the essence of truth as aletheia, an early Greek word for truth, and interprets it as disclosing a way of human existence, that is, a way of being of Dasein or a way in which Dasein is "to be." Li finds that this radical existential and non-epistemic interpretation by Heidegger of the Greek concept of truth...

Explorations in promoting conceptual change in electrical concepts via ontological category shift

Chi (1992, 1993) Chi et al. (1994) suggests that many of the difficulties encountered by students in learning Physics concepts arise because they attribute the ontology of material substances to these concepts. These concepts are actually a special type of process - 'Constraint-Based Interactions' (CBI). Slotta and Chi (1996) reported on a study where a group of students explicitly trained in the CBI ontology showed significant gains over a control group in problem solving performance in eight simple electric circuit problems. This paper reports on a series of four studies which explore the usefulness of the ontological categorization framework in investigating students' alternative conceptions of electric circuits and in developing a teaching strategy for promoting conceptual change in the learning of basic electric circuitry concepts.

The Logic and Methodology of Science in Early Modern Thought (review)

240 Reviews Wilson, Fred, The Logic and Methodology ofScience in Early Modern Thought, Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1999; cloth; pp. xxiv, 608; R R P US$95,£65; ISBN 0802043569. This is a monumental book in size, 608 pages with index. Its concerns are monumental too, and indeed the author begins by acknowledging the difficulty of writing 'one story' ofthese concerns: The story of the emergence of the truly human reason of natural science and of the Enlightenment is a complex one. Several times over the last decade I have tried to sketch out a book that would deal with the relevant interactions oflogic, methodology ofscience, and ontology/metaphysics/epistemology in the early m o d e m period. In the end, I gave up: the themes were simply too interrelated to be organized in a simple manner. The result has been seven essentially independent but none the less interrelated studies. I hope that, taken both individually and together, these studies will help in our undertanding of the emergence of the m o d e m mind. (pp. xxi-ii) The book consists of these seven studies, most subdivided into titled sections (which in turn may be subdivided into named topics). This review then will comment briefly on each of the seven studies. Study One, 'Establishing the N e w Science: Rationalist and Empiricist Responses to Aristotle' (pp. 3-134), describes the methods of the 'old' science and of the new in terms of their differing cognitive aims. It discusses both what is similar in the rationalist and empirist responses (their concern with experiment, rather than the intrinsic nature of things, as the proper method, and their shared belief that the 'logic of experiment was the logic of eliminative induction') and what is different (basing the logic of eliminative induction, on the one hand, for the rationalists, on axioms as self-evident, and on the other, for the empiricists, on the assumption ofprinciples which are nevertheless assumed to be empirically justifiable, by laws yet to be discovered). This is a densely argued discussion, elaborating particularly on the work of Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, Locke and Hume, and illustrating the role of the last two in establishing the empirical response as the secure method of the new science. Study Two, 'Logic under Attack: The Early M o d e m Period' (pp. 135-261), ends with the statement, 'It is Locke's achievement to have defended solid philosophy against the fancies of the metaphysicians.' The metaphysicians defended objective necessities: the empiricist Locke, in contrast, demonstrated that 'what guarantees Reviews 241 the truth of our ideas, insofar as it can be guaranteed, is our deliberate effort to conform our thought to the rules ofthe logic oftruth', that is, w e re-order our ideas through reflection on our observation and experience. This chapter gives a detailed description oftraditional and modern logic, both technically and historically. Study Three, 'Berkeley's Metaphysics and Ramist Logic' (pp. 262-89), describes Berkeley's innovative understanding of predication (based not on the traditional ontology of substance and property, but on the relation of part to whole) and suggests this may have been influenced by the logical account of Petrus Ramus. Ramus wrote for those who needed to produce effective public oratory in legal, political and religious contexts; the role of substance was not central. After Berkeley, after Ramus, 'things' could be conceived of, not as Aristotelian substances, but as bundles ofproperties. Study Four, 'Empiricist Inductive Methodology: Hobbes and H u m e ' (pp. 290-318), offers a re-reading of Hobbes, which aims to show that 'Hobbes is struggling to articulate the empiricist inductive methodology that H u m e was later to articulate and defend' and that, contrary to the usual scholarly opinion, Hobbes, as Bacon's secretary, appears to have learned some of his ideas from Bacon's method ofeliminative induction. Study Five, 'Rules by Which to Judge of Causes' before H u m e ' (pp. 31963 ), gives an historical account of such rules, from the Aristotelian tradition of the nature of causation, as explained by Aquinas, to the explanations of the early modem rationalists and empiricists. Bacon is credited withfirstdiscovering the rules ofeliminative induction, but...

Form Without Matter

Three different concepts of matter are identified: matter as what a thing is immediately made of, matter as stuff of a certain kind, and matter in the (dubious) sense of material ‘substratum’. The doctrine of hylomorphism, which regards every individual concrete thing as being ‘combination’ of matter and form, is challenged. Instead it is urged that we do well to identify an individual concrete thing with its own particular ‘substantial form’. The notions of form and matter, far from being correlative, are relatively independent. There is nothing absurd in the notion of form without matter. Matter provides neither a principle of individuation nor a criterion of identity for individual concrete things: their form alone provides both. Finally, a substance ontology which admits also the existence of particular qualities, or tropes, is to be preferred both to a substance ontology which denies the existence of tropes and to a pure trope ontology.