The Christian Vanguard

The following is an essay I had to write for class. Footnotes could not be copied over. Basing yourself on Metaphysics Book VIII, Chapter 2 and Meteorology Book IV, Chapter 12 write a concise account of what sorts of things you believe count as Aristotelian substances. Again, I encourage you to draw from other things we have read by Aristotle (for example the material from Physics Book II and On The Soul Book II), if you find it useful to do so. I think the sorts of things that count as Aristotelian substances include anything composed with matter. As Aristotle states, matter is a kind of differentiae, and anything with differentiae is, for if it were not, it wouldn’t be differentiating anything to begin with. So, humans, cats, grass, gold, these types of things are Aristotlean substances. I don’t think artefacts, though they have matter in a certain sense, would count as Aristotlean substances because they don’t have an essence, or form. As Aristotle says, what a thing is is determine...

Baker’s constitution view states that personal identity depends on mental property of the First Person Perspective. This is the ability to conceive oneself as oneself, or as a referent to the first person pronoun. This is not to say it is a being with a point of view, as mere animals do, but mere animals cannot conceive of themselves as the subject of such thoughts. Having a point of view is necessary but not alone sufficient for being a person. Having a FPP is sufficient for being a person. Further, human persons are constituted by human bodies. Now constitution is a relation between different primary kinds, which entails that they are not identical. A statue may be constituted by copper, but the statue is not identical to the statue because they have different persistence conditions. For example, a bronze statue may be flattened to make copper wire, and though the copper persists, the statue does not. On the other side of the coin, a statue may be made of marble or cheese, and the ...