Form, substance, and mechanism
Philosophical Review 113 (1):31-88 (2004)
Abstract
Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of categorizing being. Aristotle’s ten categories now strike us as quaint, and no attempt to improve on that effort meets with much interest. Still, no one supposes that reality is smoothly distributed over space. The world at large comes in chunks, and there remains a widespread intuition, even among philosophers, that some of these chunks have a special sort of unity and persistence. These, we tend to suppose, are most truly agents and subjects, and are what exist in the most proper sense of the term. We believe, in other words, in substances.Author's Profile
ISBN(s)
0031-8108
DOI
10.1215/00318108-113-1-31
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Citations of this work
Cartesian Substances, Individual Bodies, and Corruptibility.Dan Kaufman - 2014 - Res Philosophica 91 (1):71-102.
Spinoza's Essentialist Model of Causation.Valtteri Viljanen - 2008 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 51 (4):412 – 437.
Scientific realism with historical essences: the case of species.Marion Godman - 2018 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 12):3041-3057.
The health of the body-machine? Or seventeenth century mechanism and the concept of health.Lisa Shapiro - 2003 - Perspectives on Science 11 (4):421-442.
Spinoza's Formal Mechanism.Christopher Martin - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (S1):151-181.
References found in this work
A Treatise of Human Nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 1958 - Philosophical Quarterly 8 (33):379-380.
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 1.René Descartes - 1984 - Cambridge University Press.