Space, Time, Matter, and Form, Essays on Aristotle’s Physics
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loginEarly in my philosophical career, roughly in the time between Geach (1962)and Wiggins (1967), I conceived the ambition of writing a fat tome onAristotle’s conception of substance. As years went by, I worked on it fromtime to time, and there was quite a long draft in existence before I finally decidedto abandon the project. The idea had been that the book would be in threeparts: (i) substance as subject of predication (the Logical Works); (ii) substanceas what persists through change (the Physical Works); and (iii) substance aswhat fundamentally exists (theMetaphysics). What finally led me to abandonthis idea was the realization (not really crystallized until my 1994) that part iiiwas hopeless. I had begun with the thought that Aristotle’s conception of whatcounted as a substance was interesting and important, even today. To clarify this,I should say that I have never believed in what some philosophers think of as‘metaphysics’, i.e. in the idea that philosophers are specially able to describe ‘thereal nature of the world’, as no one else is. That seems to me a mere chimera. ButI did believe in what Strawson in the preface to his (1959) called ‘descriptivemetaphysics’, i.e. in the idea that philosophers can at least say how we ordinarilythink of ‘the world’, and what is more fundamental or less fundamental in thisordinary way of thinking. That was where the Aristotelian conception of asubstance seemed to me to be highly significant, and yet (in those days) ratherneglected.
