Ep. 337: Aristotle on Primary Being (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. Listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 337 are what is the most fundamental kind of being? And how can we talk about it? This is our third discussion of Aristotle's metaphysics. You might want to rewind to episode 335 and start with that. Today we're discussing book seven, aka Zeta. For more information, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, being me in virtue of myself in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, being in more than just one way in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

0:42 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, first in definition, but second in knowledge. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:48 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, trying to go from what is less knowable to what is more knowable by nature in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:55 Mark: Seth, are you saying that you go both ways? That you go both to the universal and to the individual?

1:01 Seth: No, what I'm saying is that I am in fact myself. In myself as well as having attributes.

1:09 Mark: Okay. I mean, as long as those attributes don't make you yourself, as long as you recognize those are merely incidental.

1:15 Seth: Yes. There's no claim of necessity in saying that I am being. In many ways.

1:19 Mark: You got your head on your shoulders. What rich, fertile comic ground we have to deal with with our topic today.

1:27 Wes: It's Aristotle banter like that that has put us where we are on the map.

1:33 Mark: This was a longer book. I whined a little bit. I ended up finishing it, but I'm. If we were gonna.

1:38 Wes: Yeah, I lied to you guys and said it was 20 something pages. It turned out to be 40. 40 excruciating difficult pages in many parts.

1:47 Mark: But we had been talking in the previous episode about how do we look into being? And the first episode was sort of considering different cosmological solutions of people saying that, well, being is basically a certain kind of matter, for instance, and why that was not going to be okay for Aristotle. I think it came out in the last episode that the way that we talk about being is we talk first and foremost about primary being, which we just were calling, I think substances at the time, or essence, or, you know, this is what we're going to get into today.

And only derivatively about properties. So the things that have attributes, those for sure have being, but the attributes themselves, they only have being derivatively. So even though it might seem like you can't talk about being at all, because being is everything, you can't contrast it with anything. So you can't even talk about it. Well, you can talk about divisions within being of the paradigm case of being versus the derivative cases. And in book Zeta we are getting. It's just all about trying to be very precise about what this paradigm being, what this primary being amounts to, which it can't be matter, it can't be that underlying stuff, it can't be the substance that Locke makes fun of, the thing that has all the properties but has no properties in itself.

And likewise it can't be form against Plato. Right. It's not that there are these universals out there that have all the being and that the individual objects have being only derivatively from them. No, it is actually the individual objects. This chair in front of you. Well, that's not a good example. This person, natural kinds has being, but in virtue of not just the combination of form and matter, but a certain conception of form that is the substantial form.

3:26 Wes: Yeah. So in our first recording, Mark, as you said, we were looking at how it is we could study being qua being at all. And it turned out we are able to do that by making this division between substance and derivative sorts of beings like accidental properties. In book Zeta, book seven, we're going to say, okay, so what is substance? Now in our previous episode, I talked about substance as if we already knew it was essence. But really he's going to look at all the different candidates in the categories. He thought substance was just the subject or the substrate, the underlying thing of which things are predicated, but it can't be predicated of anything else.

And he's not going to reject that. Ultimately that's going to turn out to be part of the truth. But he's going to look at other candidates and come to this weird conclusion. First of all, an anti Platonic conclusion that substance is not the universals on the one hand. But on the other hand, substance is essence, which seems like a very contradictory thing to say because the essence of something will turn out to be its natural kind. The essence of you, Mark, is human. And it seems like human is something shared by all of us and therefore universal.

But Aristotle is going to say, actually human is your essence, but insofar as you possess it, it is not a universal.

4:53 Dylan: To me, the angle in on it is its emphasis on what makes it this, where this means an independent thing, it's not just a this in the sense of pointing to a particular place or a particular thing, but a particular portion of something. But how do you get to the joints between what individual independent? This is that's where he is focusing on how to understand what being is. That's the paradigmatic case. He's always navigating towards seeing the source of being in what is an independent thing.

5:31 Wes: Yeah, I think he's getting drawn in two directions in a way, and finding a really fascinating compromise between them. One direction is to say, well, look, if anything is an entity, it is these particulars. So it's always one candidate in metaphysics.

5:48 Dylan: Right.

5:48 Wes: What are beings? Well, it's these particular things. But if we want to say why something is a particular, as opposed to five particulars.

5:56 Dylan: Right.

5:57 Wes: If you want to say how we pick out one thing versus another, we start to get into trouble because we can't say a thing is one except by appeal to these kinds, these natural kinds. And that seems to tug us in the direction of universals. So anytime we do metaphysics, this is the paradox we're encountering. And again, Aristotle has a very interesting solution. Right.

6:18 Mark: We said to be at all last time is to be something specific. So to be a unified thing, and to be a unified thing that can be defined of a specific type. So we do get later in this chapter into the question of definitions, which I guess he's already talked about in other books, but he wants to sort of make a move from the metaphysical to the logical, to talk about how it seems like Socrates. He's wanting to argue that Socrates is a particular, is a bearer, his primary being. But isn't Socrates a bunch of things? I mean, he certainly has a bunch of properties, so why is he not a compound? And this gets to the idea of, I mean, even the idea of, well, Socrates is a human, which is a rational animal. Wasn't that two things, animal plus rational? So he wants to consider why, even though the definition has two words in it, that essence is still a thing and not a compound thing.

7:16 Dylan: Yes. So that essence, and this is going to be the challenging thing in terms of the essence of an individual person like Socrates. Part of it comes down to resolving the ability to talk about the essence of Socrates as human, and whether or not that in maintaining Socrates particularity, you end up with a individual particular essence, Socrates. So do you end up at the end with as many essences as there are individual unities in the end or not?

7:50 Wes: Yeah, I think since we're jumping around, I think I'll just give an overall structure of this book. So he starts out giving us different senses of being, and we'll get into the details of that. That's in the first section of the book. Then he goes into different candidates for substance. Essence Universal Substratum asserts that substance seems identical to essence, but it's kind of gets us into some problems concerning accidental properties and what constitutes a unity. He'll identify particular things with their essences, say they're identical.

Then he's going to get into production or generation things that the whole concept of the way form is put into matter, because it turns out essence is going to be form. So he's going to have to think about. He's interested in particular material, sensible objects, and he wants to get into the nitty gritty details of what it means for them to have an essence, what it means for them to have a form, even though they are material.

8:52 Mark: I hadn't really thought about this, but just, you know, for Plato, there's a reason only for things that are unchanging can have forms at all, right? A triangle can have a form, but like actual triangles in the world. Well, that piece of stone that's triangular now. Well, it's always changing. So you can't really say anything. You can only be coherent about that individual material triangle by referring to the form. The forms are what actually are and have essences. So to say that a changing material thing can actually have an essence and that they are the things that have essences creates some new issues.

9:24 Wes: It's a radical move, and it creates a lot of issues. And one of the reasons Plato didn't want to go down that road. So after he gets into production, he'll get into definitions and whether his overall concern is whether or not the parts of the concrete thing and the matter in particular is part of the form, whether we should think of that conceptually as part of the form. And in some cases there are reasons we might want to do that, right? Human beings are instantiated in flesh and bone, and it looks like those themselves are an essential part of what it is to be human in the sense of being the only sort of substrate we might be instantiated in.

He's going to argue against that intuition. Then he's going to get into why substances can't be universals. And he's going to end up telling us, resolving the paradox of how it is that we can say ultimately this unified particular thing, which is what it is in virtue of a form and whose whole is greater than its parts, why we can't see the form as a part. In a weird way, we want to say it's a form matter compound, but that doesn't mean it's a typical kind of compound where you have Two things joined together, form and matter. Form does not constitute a separate part in Aristotle's eyes, because it would lead to this third man, regress.

So this is the point where we should start thinking about Hegel's concept of force. Force is what comes to the rescue, but we'll get there. So that's the overall structure of this. You know, when we start jumping around between definitions and essences, it's kind of difficult to see. It looks, when you first read it, it looks like it's just this big jumble of things, but I think there's a flow to it.

11:03 Mark: Yeah, I definitely got thrown off by the time we got to. We're going to make this logical shift. We're going to start talking more about definitions. But if that was all just a way of working up to talking toward the end of the chapter about what a form actually is for Aristotle. Okay, that makes sense. Form is defined by the definition.

11:22 Seth: Right.

11:22 Mark: You think a form is a really complicated thing.

11:25 Seth: Right.

11:25 Mark: It's all the nuances, the shape of something, which for a perfect circle, you could maybe define very simply. But for a human being, like, what goes into their form would be at least as complicated as like the entire string of DNA or something like that. But no, no, the form is just rational animal, period. And I guess animal implies some things about it being fleshy and stuff, but that doesn't mean that the parts of the form include the bones and the ligaments and the stuff that you would, you know, an anatomist would say is the human form.

11:55 Wes: It's even more radical than that. He's thinking that a human being could be instantiated in something other than flesh and bone.

12:02 Dylan: He considers effectively the whole artificial intelligence a possibility.

12:09 Wes: That's what our commentator Politis noted. But I. That that had occurred to me before I read that commentary.

12:15 Dylan: I didn't even get to that part of the commentary.

12:18 Wes: Wow, this looks like AI. This looks like he's considering. And we covered this in our episode on Block, you know, it looks like he's considering a possibility of an Android.

12:28 Dylan: Yeah, Data is clearly a human being, so.

12:30 Wes: But also, you know, philosophically, it's come up many times we would want to say a Martian or some alien from another planet could be a person, which is what counts as human being in this context, regardless of whether they are our particular species or.

12:47 Dylan: Yeah, and it also would, you know, in terms of rational animal. Right. Then the distinction you'd make even with other species, I think also becomes a live question in Aristotle's case, just because the material flesh and blood form of a human being isn't the axis.

13:05 Seth: I mean, I don't know if we're jumping a little ahead to that section where he gets into definition, but I thought what he was saying is that his notion of the primary being is the thinghood, what something is and also what it is for something to be. But I was under the impression that he was saying that the definition is like the minimum necessary to distinguish the thing from other primary things. So like he says, you know, featherless biped or mammal or whatever he says, and he says featherless is superfluous because there are other featherless things that it doesn't add anything to the definition of rational animal or biped or whatever, however he wants to do it.

So in essence, you're right, it's not highfalutin, it's not complex, it's not a definite descriptor. Right. He sort of anticipates in this concept of the long string of attribution that would get you to a full explication of what a thing is. Instead, it's what is the minimum necessary to mark this basic primary thing off from other basic primary things. Is that fair when it doesn't even

14:20 Mark: mark the individual off? Right, Because Socrates and you and me are all the same primary thing. That's weird to say that what makes it a distinct thing is its essence. And each essence has a definition, but the definition only expresses the universal portion of the essence. But yet we're saying this is a token essence that your private human essence. So we haven't, with the definition, demarcated you as substance off from me as substance.

14:44 Wes: I want to just remind listeners, when we say thinghood, primary being and substance, we're using different translations of the same word, Ousia. And what it is to be is essence. And he does identify those things. But as the book begins, he's not committed to that. He wants to consider that as a possibility, just as he's going to consider universal as a possibility. He'll reject universal in favor of essence. And then we'll get into. I think we should wait until later to get into this whole what he calls method of division, which he's picking up from the sophist, where you drill down, you keep going down until you get a genus and differentiae that singles out a species. And once you've done that, you've gotten a definition, and that definition is of an essence, or as Mark points out, the universal part of the essence, which is what is knowable. Another wrinkle on the Whole story.

15:35 Dylan: It occurs to me you might have a good way to talk about this difference in why Aristotle is considering these candidates. Wes, Because I confess I've always found this a little confusing. When he formulates essences, the what it is to be, the to ti en einai. Right. I've always found that an interesting way to formulate it. Right. You're sort of turning the question into the answer to the question, into the thing that you're looking into. So. Well, I'm interested in being. I'm interested in the what it is to be of something. And that makes total sense.

But it also seems a little bit like what work did that do for you? What I'm wondering maybe that you have a better handle on is the difference between that and the question of the ousia of something or the prote ousia, where we're considering that the being or the thinghood of it. What the difference is when we say we're going to equate ousia with essence, what is the distinction that's going on there?

16:34 Wes: I think what it comes down to is he's. This does get us kind of to the first section of book Zeta. He's thinking about the different senses of being and the way in which particularity in a way does seem to be primary. And this concept of hupokeimenon and the substrate does seem to be intuitively the thing that's primary. And it makes us want to say that matter is substance. It really pushes us in that direction. And that's why the pre Socratics do that. And of course they're not wrong in a way, especially when we get to modern science, we know that matter is going to play a big role in saying what the substance of something is.

I don't think it entirely leaves Aristotle behind. So there's that kind of pull to say, on the one hand, particularity is substance. On the one hand, matter is substance, but on the one hand we really do. Even though he rejects Plato, there are good reasons for saying universals are substances. And I think Aristotle wants to keep the part of that account that is useful without getting into the trouble that Plato gets into, in essence is his compromise.

17:39 Dylan: So when we're talking about being and investigating ousia, we have this challenge of the particular and the universal. And the question of the particular draws us towards something like hupokeimenon, the underlying substrate. And on the other hand, we have this notion that is more universal, that pulls us towards universality, which is the what it is to be the essence and is navigating between Those things as distinct forms of what it means to talk about something having being.

18:08 Wes: You know. In this first section, he'll do two things. One of them is to distinguish. We've seen this before, you know, these different ways in which something could be said to be. And it's basically a distinction between substance in the sense of hupokeimenon, in the sense of substrate, and then properties. And the properties have only derivative existence. They only have existence insofar as they belong to some sort of substrate. But then we also want to say, well, maybe a natural kind in particular, which is not just any old property, is the thing that tells us something about what the substrate is. He does all of that in this first part of the first section.

18:47 Mark: Substrate is interestingly ambiguous in that it could just be what do you predicate things of. Right, the subject of which nothing else can be. I'm going to say it backwards again, that you can't predicate it of something else. But substrate could also mean what we talked about in our Locke discussion of strip all the properties away and what is left. Locke said nothing. We couldn't possibly know anything like this. And so Aristotle is not trying to strip it that far away. He does actually talk about stripping properties at one point. But it comes down to, you can't strip away Socrates, humanity without it not being Socrates anymore.

You could strip away his being five feet tall and his being pale and other things. Could you strip away the fact that he was born at such and such a time? I think for Aristotle you can, you know, as a mental exercise, this is all about logical independence. It's not about true metaphysical independence. But you could not strip that. That last bit. He will agree that substrate, if that word means to you a bare substrate, like. Well, that's not what he's talking about.

19:55 Wes: He's going to say matter is what it looks like you have left when you strip away everything. But that's not going to be what he wants for an ultimate substrate. So substance is first in definition in a sense that it's got to always be present in the definition, in the order of knowledge. It's the thing that we can know best, but it's also kind of the thing we know last. We start out with pre theoretical conceptions of objects, vague, you know, this is Meno's problem. And then we work our way towards knowing what a thing actually is in itself.

20:29 Mark: Chapter 2 Now, thinghood seems to belong most evidently to bodies. Whether these alone are independent things or there are also others, or just some of these or some in addition to some other things, or none of these. But something different must be examined. It's really an exploratory text. He's not just telling us. He's saying lots of tentative things, fishing around and making different arguments, and eventually.

20:51 Dylan: Right.

20:52 Mark: This whole thing could have been reduced quite drastically, I feel like, but maybe we wouldn't have as much. I had a hard time being patient with the subtleties of, you know, what is actually said in this section versus what is in the previous section, when he could have just done what we have been doing in the last half hour and just tell you the answer.

21:11 Seth: Yeah, I think there could be a summary. You know, there could be a Spark Notes or Cliff Notes or whatever they are of this that did that for you. But I'm sure for him, especially if these are notes from a course, that would not be the appropriate way for him to go. Right. So we've already established that the primary mode of being is what something is or thinghood, not its attributes. Right. And he says, okay, so some people think that thinghood belongs to bodies. Would that be equivalent to saying material or just more like physical things? Is that what he's trying to distinguish here?

Think of physical things like physical bodies. He says others, like Plato, believed that there were forms, thinghood was not a body, thinghood would be in the form. And that also there were mathematical things have a kind of thinghood that is somehow differentiated from the thinghood of forms. And then he cites Speusippus, who believed.

22:15 Mark: That sounds so made up. Speusippus.

22:17 Seth: Yes. More kinds of thinghood originating from the one and from each source of thing hood. So in other words, numbers, magnitude, soul, and so on, they all have thinghood, but the thinghood is of a different type. So in other words, instead of a universal thinghood that crosses different types of entities, each entity that has a thing hood might have its own specific type of thing hood that would be different. And so essentially, these are the possibilities, and we need to examine and figure out which ones make sense and which ones don't.

22:49 Wes: Yeah. So we've got bodies, forms, math, and the one. That's how I break it out. And math is actually an intriguing possibility because, of course, it will end up playing a big role in modern science. Also because Aristotle mentions that spatiality, right. Surface, line, point, unit, but in particular, what Descartes will call extension, that's actually a candidate that Descartes will choose. So that Descartes will leave aside what we think of as the density or the physicality of things in favor of extension. And then we saw that with Lucretius as well, right? Atoms are just geometrical shapes and everything gets built out of that. The one is always like an interesting option. If you're worried that we can't really distinguish natural kinds and you can't say this thing is a unity and this thing is a real unity, you might just think the only real unity is the universe as a whole.

23:40 Mark: The fact that he talks about independence, oh, we're looking for primary being. It's independent. It was good that we read the Rutledge, because he addresses, well, this independence is not physical independence. Because you might think that Aristotle is just sort of naively thinking that I could just yank Socrates out of the universe. No, only logically, which even that I think might be a point of contention in certain Eastern forms. I mean, everything is just defined by its opposition to other things. And so there is no even logical independence of anything. But Aristotle, he's comfortable with the idea that this is something that intuitively makes sense to us.

24:19 Seth: Well, and it becomes, I think is significantly more clear later on in the chapter when he starts talking about being and becoming. I don't know that we want to bring that in here, but that really helped clarify why the line of thinking goes the direction it does here. You can't answer. We know the issue with the Parmenidean solution if you're trying to account for. And he does speak of Heraclitus frequently through the course of this chapter when he's working through different kinds of issues to talk about that.

24:50 Dylan: I mean, isn't Aristotle's insistence here against someone who says the whole is the only real candidate because in the end everything is somehow dependent on another thing is really an insistence on the manifest independence of some things. I don't know that there's more than that. Part of it is going to be logically to be able to get to how that can be. But to me, he would accuse anybody of saying that the whole is the only thing, that there are no such things as individual entities is that it's just obviously not true.

25:28 Wes: So this is still a very live metaphysical issue and a very difficult one. We want to say that some things are what they are in virtue of themselves. They're mind independent and determinant. Because if there is no such thing, we have to become relativists and the law of non contradiction doesn't hold. That was the whole point of the law of non contradiction part. There's got to be something out there that has an essence. There's Got to be something out there that's a natural kind. Now, it may not turn out to be animal species. Philosophers argue about how to define a species and the fuzzy boundaries between them.

Maybe it's things like atoms or other even smaller units. Maybe those are the only things that turn out to have essences. And when we look at the natural world around us, yes, a zebra is mind independently. A zebra. But it's kind of derivative of smaller essence units. We want to drill down further before we say this has a natural kind. Water is, you know, for contemporary philosophers, the paradigmatic case of a natural kind. But they kind of avoid human and all those examples now because they get messy. So you can see why, if you're worried about those problems, you can see why.

Well, it's just the universe as a whole. That's the natural kind. And if there's unities, if there's apparent phenomenal unities within it, it's derivative of that. You could just go the other direction. Not drill down, but drill out, so to speak.

26:52 Mark: Is it open to Aristotle to think that maybe it's only atoms that have essences? If he is defining essence as something that can be defined, that when you get below a certain micro level. Right. The quarks are not going to have essences in that way?

27:07 Wes: I mean, it seems to me he gives that short shrift. He mentions it in our last reading. He mentions the atomist. It doesn't look anything like what I thought atomism was. It doesn't look like Lucretius's account of Epicurus, for instance. And maybe it is somewhere in his work. But I don't. I haven't ever seen him taking atomism seriously. Because that would be interesting to see what he says about it.

27:28 Dylan: It feels like it would align with his discussion of things like letters versus syllables. What comes down to, effectively, his insistence that the whole is greater than the part and that you have a different essence between A and B&AB.

27:48 Mark: Strangely, I thought that he was using the syllable example as well. In some things, the essence is defined in terms of the parts, syllables being one. Syllables are defined in terms of their letters. But biological beings are not defined in terms of their bones. I agree with you. I think that in both cases we should be looking at emergence.

28:08 Dylan: I thought that was his whole point of that section. But we can maybe look at the sentences more carefully when we get there, I think.

28:14 Wes: Mark, you mentioned emergence. Let's come back to that. Because when he's saying a thing is identical to its essence, that's an alternative. To saying the essence is predicated of the thing. He doesn't want to say the natural kind is predicated of the thing, because then it would have to be universal. So we use an identity relation instead, which is, I think, Aristotle's version of emergence.

28:37 Mark: I was comparing this to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, his idea that what is the basic component of the world? Well, it is a fact. It is a merging of a subject with a predicate, which is, what are the metaphysical things corresponding to those verbal things? It would seem like a fact, then is a compound thing. It's, you know, it's a red point. In this, we defined a grid, and so we set a location and then a quality that it has that is red. But the basic thing for Wittgenstein is that point is red. And you can't. Even though it seems verbally that we can divide it into the things, metaphysically, you can't divide it any further. That is the basics. So it's the same thing here. The substantial form, which seems like it's just matter plus form, is the basic. But you can't say the matter is part of it and the form is part of it.

29:27 Wes: Section two is. Okay, what are the. Some of the candidates for substance? He's really getting into what people thought. It's Aristotle's typical approach, which is to review what some others people have said. And then in section three, it's as if he starts over and he says, okay, what are the candidates for substance? But let's just do this more abstractly. And that's where he's going to say we have essence, universal and subject, or substratum, depending on how you translate it. Those are our. Well, actually, he gives four candidates. Sorry, essence, universal, genus, and substratum.

30:00 Dylan: Is that anything other than a categorization of the things that he talked about in two?

30:05 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. You know, he's saying, okay, let's look at our intuitions. Let's look at what people said in two and then. And three. Let's get more systematic.

30:14 Mark: Okay, so if we want to consider material as the thing. Hood. So the substratum. Wes, you were saying before, what he considers a substratum is not a bare nothingness, but it is the underlying material. Right, the material. It's not that a piece of bronze has as its primary property that it is bronze. I mean, you just can't reduce bronze to anything further. But that doesn't make it a bronze statue.

30:38 Wes: I hate to disagree with you, to say, here's the Radical thing he's going to do. The substratum is not the matter. It turns out the essence is. The substratum is the weird count that he's going to give. So it's going to be substance, is going to be essence, and it is going to be substratum. All those. And it is going to be form. All those things become one thing. And he will argue in this that the picture he definitely does not want is a substratum matter with essence predicated of it. That's a view that he thinks is going to get us into trouble.

31:11 Seth: Wes, are you saying that he's going to say of the four ways that we articulated essence, universal, genus and substratum. Essence, universal and substratum are all the same thing, or all interrelated, not the universal. Well, the universal is the form. Is it?

31:29 Mark: The form is a particular. For Plato, the universal would be the form. But we were just saying that for Aristotle, there's like the form token. We could say the substantial form.

31:40 Wes: Philosophers call it the immanent form. It's the particular token form in the.

31:44 Seth: Okay.

31:44 Wes: In the individual object. And he's going to argue explicitly because universal shared.

31:49 Seth: Right. So to recapitulate, in other words, Aristotle's point here that he's going to spend more time on for the rest of it is the thinghood is somehow a combination of immanent form and material, and not either one of those alone.

32:06 Mark: Neither is it one of them or the other or merely the sum of them.

32:10 Seth: But there's.

32:11 Mark: It is

32:13 Wes: the thing that is the form. Slash essence and slash substratum, subject. The reason why he wants to say it's the substratum or the subject is because we're not drilling down to the matter to say what things are predicated of. If you say the rabbit is white, you're not saying here's some matter and it's. Here's one of the properties of this matter. It's white. And here's another property. It's rabbit. He doesn't like that the thing is the rabbit.

32:38 Seth: It sounds like. I was thinking that substratum is material, like it's the same. I was using those interchangeably. Or he was. And that's what you're saying that's not the case?

32:48 Mark: Well, that's what he considers. And Wes is saying that he revises that. This is one of those things, like many people consider the substratum. You know, if you think about it, the substratum would have to be the matter. He does say that, I believe overtly. But then he changes his mind.

33:04 Wes: What he says is, it seems like matter would be the natural thing that we would think is substratum. Once you strip all of the properties off a thing, isn't that what the substratum is? And it'll say, but this is impossible. Why is it impossible? Because one of the things we want out of this concept of subject is that it be a this, right? If I'm predicating a property as something, I want it to be a this that's separable, a real unity. And then I can put a property on top of it. I can't put a property on top of this completely indeterminate stuff, which I

33:38 Mark: guess just bronze by itself would still be indeterminate because it's not this bronze. Right? Is that the idea? Or why couldn't you have a token matter and say, that is what I'm

33:48 Seth: getting hung up here is we have matter, we have material for him, does that this have to be a perceptible body? So in other words, there has to be something essentially form molds something into a. This or form is used by some productive power to mold. Let's just use the word material for a second into a specific this. So that this is a bronze urn or a clay pot. Clay is not the essence of the clay pot. But there is a material that has form which was crafted by something.

34:25 Wes: And yet the clay is not going to be part of the definition of the thing. It's not going to be part of the essence he wants to say, because it could be a bronze pot. It could be any other matter we choose.

34:35 Dylan: That's why human being. So a. You wouldn't say a pile of bones and flesh, even if it's arranged in a particularly human shape. And then you predicate of it that it's human, just like the example that Wes gave of rabbit as being one of the properties. That's not the case. The humanness of it isn't a predicate. You also have that the essence of the human isn't going to be wrapped up in the bones at all. It's not going to be part of the definition. You're not going to have it any of those attributes. This is sort of going the other direction. You're going to have any of those attributes are going to be part of the essence of a human being. Therefore, the what it is to be of a human being will not require that it have flesh and bones.

35:23 Mark: I don't think we read the thing today to make it clear what he thinks of the term animal. Such that an animal doesn't have to have flesh and bones. I'm interested now in even an organism, you know, plant that has the nutritive capacity. I did notice in this that he talks about an animal. Not the rational animal, but the sensory animal. You know, what distinguishes animal from plants is sensation. And that sensation characterizes and pervades its whole being. That it is not just merely. It does a number of things. And sensation is one of them. But it really is the defining characteristic that distinguishes it from a plant.

Then there could be artificial intelligences that would count as rational animals, presumably. There could be things that are not in flesh that count as other kinds of animals. There could be things that are not in whatever plants are made of. That would functionally count as plants. I haven't actually read anything in Aristotle

36:14 Dylan: to indicate that you can get the sense of it right. Because of the notion of what it is. To be is the way in which it's active.

36:22 Wes: Yeah, I think it's implied, Mark. I mean, I think you're right. It's implied by what he says about flesh and blood. It's the matter of human beings as we know them. But it doesn't need to be. It could be something else. I mean, he says that in this reading.

36:34 Mark: It might be a big engineering challenge to create androids, artificial people, but artificial plants. I bet we could do it. I bet we could figure out what the structure that he thinks captures what a plant is. And we could just make some.

36:46 Wes: I think the best way to make an artificial plant Is just to exactly replicate what nature did. You'd be using the same organic material. I guess you could do it with something different.

36:56 Seth: Have you guys never been into an

36:58 Wes: office building before with all the fake plants?

37:01 Seth: Any green thing. Any green thing you see in a hallway or an elevator is an artificial plant.

37:07 Dylan: That's an artificial plant in the sense that it's not a plant. Not an artificial plant in the sense that it's a plant in essence, that's been created, not naturally.

37:17 Mark: I want to see a plant, an artificial plant that grows. It can be made of fabric, of velvet, a beautiful velvet. But I want it to grow and die. I want it to die.

37:27 Seth: This proves my point. It's about becoming, not about being.

37:31 Dylan: But those two things are tied up together.

37:33 Wes: Because the.

37:34 Dylan: What it is to be of something like a plant or an animal is the way in which it's becoming all

37:42 Mark: the time, the being at work. Have we run into that term yet?

37:46 Wes: We'll get to it in the next reading.

37:48 Seth: The core problem of philosophy as referenced

37:51 Mark: by the band Men at Work.

37:53 Seth: Yeah, being at work. Being Men at Work.

37:55 Wes: Mark, you just stole exactly what I was about to say.

37:59 Mark: Who can it be now? I mean, come on, it's right there. Defined as down under.

38:06 Wes: So speaking of plants, the way he ends this, if we want to think about substances, let's think about biological substances. Let's think about organisms, because in his paradigm, right, they're sensible, so they're more knowable than other candidates for substance. And so they're a good starting place for our investigation. We might find out that universals turn out to be substances. We're going to be open to that. But we're going to start with these particular paradigmatic examples of individual substances and then figure it out. And that leads us into chapter four.

38:42 Dylan: But isn't that also, in those example, choosing plants or animals as the paradigmatic case that we have to have an answer for when we consider being? It tips his hand in some ways, right? Because if he's navigating towards that, he's not navigating towards all the things like where you end up with math or things that are in our imaginations that are perfect. Some notion of perfection is not going to be there at all. The manifestation of. Well, we were just talking about this. The manifestation of being and becoming in one thing, of generation and corruption. The fact that he's taken as his hallmark example of an entity, of a thing that has being is a living entity, whether it be a plant or an animal, that's tipping his hand.

39:35 Wes: I think you're right, Dylan. And he's going to straight up say the next section. He's just going to say, well, it seems like its substance would be identical with its essence. So he's well on his way to, you know, spelling out that account. But it is weird to do metaphysics. And when you start to think, okay, if there are things that are what they are in virtue of themselves, what would they be? And then you look around you and it's like the desk, the things that I tend to call things, mind independently, they are what they are. Here's a speaker, here's a desk, here's a computer.

They don't count. In fact, almost nothing counts. I mean, they count in a sense because technicians are artists and the form from the souls put into them and all that stuff, but not really. Really, all we're left with are animals and plants. It's kind of a funny result if you think about it. Those are the only things that really exist in and of themselves. And Then later on we'll find out water and atoms and things like that. But most of what we would call a thing in our daily environment, I think, according to this type of metaphysics, doesn't count.

40:36 Dylan: He's taking the daily environment in some respect, even if he's honing in on selective examples as being the paradigm he wants to grab a hold of. He's insisting you have to start there.

40:48 Wes: I think he's saying he's open to other possibilities, but at least if anything's going to be substance, it's a rabbit. I mean, come on, it's a rabbit. Maybe something else is, but let's start with the rabbit.

40:58 Dylan: But that's what I mean by tipping his hand, right? Because I think there's a way in which other people like Plato or other philosophers, they say, well, obviously a rabbit isn't a thing, right? Because there are all kinds of rabbits. Right? I mean, for him, the existence of particulars that have their own motions are clearly things that have being that we have to account for that.

41:21 Wes: He would be open to saying the rabbit is what it is by virtue of a Platonic form. At least that's what he has to say he's open to at this point. And of course, he does. You know, he gives lengthy arguments against that, but. So he is considering it. But even Plato, through Socrates, will admit we're not going to choose mud as in the Parmenides, that's not going to be our paradigmatic case, and ask whether there's a Platonic form of that, because not even Plato is sure about that. So we need to start with, you know, the most organized type of thing that seems independent and something that is in its own right.

41:58 Mark: Right. And in this whole book, he is concerned with explanation. He is concerned with causation. So Dylan, the way you were putting it, of, you know, this thing has a causal organization such that it is the cause. So I can say, who did that? Dylan did that. Whereas if the incoming tide did something like, well, the tide is a heap, is an amorphous mass. I'm pointing out something that happened, but it's not that anyone did it in particular. So why would I say that There is a specific being. Water itself ends up being the being. And the fact that all these water atoms are working together water molecules to produce something. If we want to give a causal account, we would end up having to talk about the substance water and its properties, not about this wave as being an entity, because the wave is just a heap.

42:49 Seth: Yeah, there's kind of two important moves in this chapter one is the kind of triangulation to hone in on this ness, or what could be a this. So if what you're talking about is a compound that could potentially or seems to contain two other this is, then it's not going to be a this. Or if it's an attribute that is not equivalent to the thing that underlies the attribute or in which the attribute adheres, that's not going to be this either. But the other move that he makes, this is mentioned in the Sachs. I'm using the Sachs translation in the preface or the introduction, is this is where he makes the linguistic move.

So he says, for what it is for something to be is is the very thing that something is. And whenever one thing is attributed, the compound is not the very thing that this is a this, as in the instance a pale person is not the very thing that is a this. If indeed this ness belongs only to independent things, therefore there is a what it is for it to be of all those things of which the articulation is a definition. And maybe just even saying there is a what it is for it to be of all those things of which there is an articulation that is something immediately eliminates the notion of natural kinds.

But what's important here is that there is an articulation which is a linguistic activity which puts us in a position to carve out this is in the world through the process of definition, a definition which is going to meet certain criteria, namely that it doesn't define a compound, it doesn't define a contingent attribute, and a few other things.

44:42 Mark: Well, let's wrap up part one with that. Please come back for part two. If you are a Partially Examined Life citizen through our website or through Patreon, you could get that right now if you just listen to the public feed or you're supporting us through Apple podcasts. You'll get it next week. Thanks so much.