Aristotle on Secondary Substance
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John Robert Mahlan
Abstract
At the beginning of Categories 5, Aristotle distinguishes between two kinds of substance: primary substance and secondary substance. Primary substances include particular living organisms, inanimate objects, and their parts. Secondary substances are the species and genera of these. This distinction is unique to the Categories, which raises the question of why Aristotle treats species and genera as substances. I argue that Aristotle has two distinct reasons for doing so, and contrast my interpretation with recent alternatives. On my view, species and genera enjoy two kinds of fundamentality – ontological and epistemological – in virtue of which they warrant their status as substances.
Acknowledgements
I first discussed some of the ideas in this paper at a workshop at Stanford University in 2014 organized by Alan Code, Katy Meadows, and Huw Duffy. I am very grateful to them for organizing that workshop, for their helpful comments at that workshop, and for welcoming me to their department that spring. Great thanks as well go to other participants in that workshop, including Keren Wilson, Ryan Putzer, and Kelvin Yang. That paper eventually became a chapter of my dissertation. I would like to thank Dan Devereux, Antonia LoLordo, and Walter Ott, all of whom read my dissertation and gave me very helpful feedback on that version of the paper. Thanks as well to an anonymous referee at Apeiron for raising challenging criticisms to an earlier version of this paper. Finally, I would like to thank Adam Tiller, Galen Barry, and Dan (again) for helpful comments on the revised version of this paper. This paper is much improved thanks to the insightful comments and criticisms of all of the above. Any remaining shortcomings are entirely my own.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Wrong Turns in the Euthyphro
- Dualisers in Aristotle’s Biology
- Aristotle on Secondary Substance
- Pyrrhonian Argumentation: Therapy, Dialectic, and Inquiry
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Wrong Turns in the Euthyphro
- Dualisers in Aristotle’s Biology
- Aristotle on Secondary Substance
- Pyrrhonian Argumentation: Therapy, Dialectic, and Inquiry
