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...

The problem given in the question “Can you bathe in the same river twice?” is that since the substance of the river is constantly renewed, it would seem that it is not the same river, and so our words, that is the names we give the things we are trying to describe, are too vague to denote that this is a river. The same is true of similar examples, such as the ship of Theseus.  Quine’s answer to the problem is to say that these questions don’t really concern the nature of identity, but rather, they concern what we choose to count as a river, a boat, or a person. What makes gives something the nature of identity is not that they have the same river stage or same river substance, but that it is a process of continually replacing the substance or stages of time. So we may be tempted to point at the Ganges River at two different times and say that because of the constant change of substance they are not both the Ganges River, but all that would be true here is that you are pointin...