Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Substance and Accident

  • The Aporetics of Primary Substance

    I am nothing if not self-critical. And so a partial retraction may be in order.  In A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind, I opened with: 1) A primary substance (a substance hereafter) is a concrete individual.  A man, a horse, a tree, a statue are stock examples of substances.  A substance…

  • In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident

    The 'thin' conception of being or existence entails that there are no modes of being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-being doctrine, the MOB doctrine if you will, is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something…