Concept
4 readings
Substance
Concept · 4 readings
Substance explains different things in Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, and Berkeley challenges material substance. Their accounts do not add up to one shared definition.
All readings
4 readings · Title A–Z
Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 48
How far can doubt take us?
Descartes moves from deliberate doubt to the certainty that he is thinking, a starting point the lesson keeps apart from his further claims about mind and body.
Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 50
Ideas, experience and a material world
Locke traces ideas to experience and distinguishes primary from secondary qualities; Berkeley challenges the material substance supposed to bear them. What does experience warrant about the objects we encounter?
Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 49
One nature or many substances?
Spinoza argues for one substance, God or Nature, and Leibniz for many monads. For Spinoza, understanding might increase freedom within a necessary order.
Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 23
What counts as explaining something?
Aristotle’s four causes answer different questions about one thing. A cup and a growing plant test what matter, form and an end can explain, including an end that no one consciously intends.