Substance and Essence in Aristotle

Substance and Essence in AristotleAuthor(s): M. J. WoodsSource: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 75 (1974 - 1975), pp. 167-180Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Aristotelian SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544872 .Accessed: 23/02/2015 16:52

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XI*-SUBSTANCE AND ESSENCE IN ARISTOTLE

by M. J. Woods

In this paper I have two aims, one more and one less ambitious. My more ambitious aim is to offer an interpretation of Aris- totle's doctrine of essence or To TI rqv elvat as we find it in the central books of the Metaphysics, and in particular to offer an clucidation of the rather obscure doctrine that in the case of some things, the thing itself is identical with its own essence, by relating it to Aristotle's theory of predication, and through that, to his attempt to deal with the problems raised by the Platonic theory of Forms. I shall try to support what I say by appeal to some rather difficult passages in Metaphysics Z 4-6. My less ambitious aim is simply to offer a contribution to the solution of some of the problems raised by those chapters. My appeal to the text is therefore extremely selective; what I want to say can, I think, be supported from other parts of Metaphysics Z and H. But if what I say makes any sense at all of some of the things said in cc 4-6, this may be some evidence in favour of it.

One of the more surprising and bizarre consequences of Aristotle's acceptance of the doctrine that substances are identical with their essences' is that it commits him to the position that a statement like 'Socrates is a man' is some sort of identity statement. That this is a consequence which Aristotle was inclined to accept has been recognised by G. E. L. Owen,2 but it has not so far, I think, been given any very extended discussion.

That Aristotle accepted it as a consequence of the identity of a substance with its essence that an individual substance like Socrates or Callias was identical with his essence may be disputed. If a certain phrase expresses the essence of the species man, it seems intelligible, and in accordance with Aristotle's doctrines, to say that in a sentence of the form 'Man is ...',

* Meeting of the Aristotelian Society at 5/7, Tavistock Place, London, W.C.I, on Monday 24th March I975, at 7.30 p.m.

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with the gap filled by the favoured, essence-specifying phrase, that phrase simply designates the form/species itself. But how can Socrates and Callias have been thought by Aristotle to be identical with their essence, which presumably is the essence of man? In the course of Z, chapter 4, Aristotle says3 that only species of a genus have an essence at all, in a strict sense.

In reply to this, it must be pointed out, first, that in the chapters of Book Z in which Aristotle is explicitly confronting the problems that we are concerned with, there is no suggestion that this conclusion has only a restricted application, and holds only of the forms of substance species, rather than of individuals. Further, the conclusion that Callias is, despite appearances, identical with the form of the species man follows if we put together some remarks in A chapter i 8 (devoted to a discussion of 'KaO' o' and therefore, in particular 'KaG' av6ro) with what is said in Z chapters 4 and 6. In A Aristotle says: 'It follows that that which is by itself (in its own right) (KaG' avTo') is necessarily also so called in several ways. For in one, [a thing is] in its own right what it is to be each thing, as for instance Callias is in his own right Callias, and what it is to be Callias' (Io22a 24-27, Kirwan's translation). Here we have Aristotle committing himself to the identity of Callias with his own essence; but the essence of anything, for Aristotle is what is expressed by a definition (horismos) of the appropriate sort, and the only such definition available for Callias will be the definition of the species he belongs to: so the essence of Callias will be the essence of the species man, which, by the doctrine of Z, will be identical with the species itself. Thus 'Callias is a man' will be an identity statement.

Resistance will be felt to this suggestion, which is indeed extremely bizarre, and it may be suggested that it is a mistake to put together the evidence of Metaphysics Z with that of A in this fashion. But evidence pointing in the same direction is forthcoming from other parts of the Metaphysics commonly thought to belong to the same period as Z.4 And if we suppose that Aristotle identified the individual man Socrates with the form of the species, sense can be made of a number of other doctrines of Metaphysics Z, as I shall indicate later.

In order to see how Aristotle arrived at this extremely


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paradoxical position, it is necessary, as Owen has insisted,5 to see his theory of predication against the background of Platonic problems. I shall begin by surveying some familiar difficulties that the classical theory of Forms encountered. What I have to say will, I hope, be reasonably uncontroversial, though the position will be presented with a view to the later, Aristotelian, developments. A central strand in the classical theory of Forms is the idea that at least a large range of simple predicate expressions are endowed with sense by being assigned to a non-sensible entity; it is of this entity that the predicates in question are most strictly and truly predicated or 'said'. It follows from this that, in the case of ordinary predicative statements, in which something is said about a sensible particular, what is said is not strictly true, at any rate if taken at its face value. The predicate-expression will be applied to ('said of') the sensible particular only derivatively from its application to the relevant Form, to which the predicate pro- perly and fundamentally applies. This, in turn, means that, in the case of ordinary predications about particulars, it wiil be possible to distinguish what the predicate is said of, and that on the basis of which it is truly said of that thing, if the predication is true. That thing on the basis of which the predicate is truly applied to the particular will, according to Plato, be a Form, and the predication in question will be a true one in so far as the particular stands in the appropriate relation to it.

If the distinctness of what a predicate is said of, and that on the basis of which it is so said is always insisted on, and the doctrine that the entity to which the predicate is assigned, in being given a sense, is that of which the predicate is most strictly true is maintained along with it, we are involved, as is now well known, in absurdities of the Third Man sort. For the first of these two is what is now cornmonly referred to, in discussions of the Third Man argument as the non-Identity assumption, the second the Self-Predication assumption, both of which underlie the derivation of Third Man regress as it occurs in the first part of the Parmenides.6

What I want to say, in brief, is that Aristotle's theory of predication involved the denial of the non-Identity Assumption in the case of substances, and the denial of self-predication in the case of non-substances. Aristotle's theory of predication, or


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the theory that we find in Metaphysics Z is to be seen partly against the background of his own categorial distinctions and the doctrine of form and matter, and partly in the light of a recognition of the features of Plato's theory which were responsible for its coming to grief. As has been pointed out recently, Aristotle seems in the Peri Ideon to have had a fair degree of understanding of the crucial assumptions that lead to the Third Man.7 This, it seems to me, provides some explanation of the fact that, in Z 6, he raises the question whether a thing is identical with its essence, and reaches the conclusion that the identity holds for some things and not for others. It also explains the fact that in the course of this chapter, at 103ia 29, he launches into a discussion of the Platonic Ideal Theory, and insists that those who postulate Forms of the Platonic kind must accept the identity.

I now want to give some support to these generalities by discussing the detail of cc 4-6. These chapters form part of Aristotle's discussions of essence, which occupies cc 4-6, Io and i i. They can, I think, be seen as forming a unity. Aristotle's preliminary survey of the candidates for being ousia occurs in c 3, Io28b 33f., and we find at the end of c I I, I037a 2I, a summary of his conclusions about essence. As I have said I shall be concerned with 4-6.

Chapter 4 has presented some difficulty as a whole to com- mentators because it appears to be divided into two parts. In the first part, Aristotle seems to be engaged in saying certain things about the subject logikos (Io29b I3), and then, at Io3oa 27, to move on from a linguistic to an ontological discussion. Unfortunately, much of what he says before the supposed point of transition seems to be as ontological as what follows it, and indeed it is hard to see Io3oa 27 as marking any serious change in the style of the discussion. Well before the supposed transition Aristotle has raised the question of what categories of thing have an essence, and concluded that in the primary sense only substances do. Conversely, after that point, at Io3oa 32 f., he introduces the concept of homonumia, and suggests that 'horismos' is one of the terms that are used homony- mously, the secondary senses of 'horismos' being related focally to the primary one, that applicable to substances; and a discussion of that kind would seem to qualify under the rubric


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'logikjs'. I think that this difficulty is an artificial one, and is created by the assumption which seems to have been generally made that the chapter falls into two halves, with Io3oa 27 as the point of transition, which in turn seems to arise from the assumption that '&EZ /Ev ot)v sKoTEVT r A ; ayev' refers back, so to speak to 'logikos' at Io29b 13. But it is not clear to me that this assumption is necessary. It seems at least possible that the remark at Io29b 13 refers simply to the immediately ensuing discussion, in which Aristotle explains the notion of essence in terms of kathauto predication, and which ends at 1. 22 when he raises the question whether 'composites in other categories' (crlvGIETa KaTa- Tas JAAas Karqyoplasr) have an essence. There is then no need to regard the chapter as falling into two halves, since the remark at IO3oa 27 will then refer back only to the passage immediately before, beginning at io3oa 17, where Aristotle suggests that 'horismos' is a term which is pollachos legomenon. The problem is if the structure of the chapter as a whole is, in any case, of less importance than the interpretation of individual arguments, to which I now turn.

The chapter begins with an explanation of the notion of essence in terms of idea of something's being said of an object kathauto. As Aristotle says, you are not mousikos kata sauton, so being mousikos is not your essence. What Aristotle seems to have had in mind is presumably the following points, which may not have been clearly distinguished by him: first, it is a contingent matter that anyone is mousikos; second, if he is, an individual could cease to be mousikos without ceasing to be the same individual, so to speak; being mousikos is not a condition of an individual's retaining his identity. Of these two points, which do need to be distinguished from one another, the second seems to have been what Aristotle seems to have had mainly in mind, for reasons which I shall elaborate in a moment. The reason that I think they are independent is that there may be some things which are true of an individual only contingently, but, given that they are true of that individual, they are not such that they could cease to be true of it, or be true at one time and not at another. So what fails to be true kathauto of a subject in the first sense need not fail to be so in the second; the second sense of kathauto is weaker than the first. Something may be such that it must be true of an individual, if true at all, throughout its existence


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but it may still be true of that individual only contingently in the first place. It may be contingently true of Socrates that he was born in 470, but being born in 470 is not something that could be true of him at one time and not at another. (This, of course, touches on matters of philosophical controversy which I cannot pursue here.) 8

Having pointed out that being mousikos is not the essence, or even part of the essence, of Socrates, Aristotle goes on to eliminate an irrelevant sense of kathauto-that in which colour belongs kathauto to a surface. For clarification of this we can turn to A c i8, especially IO22a 29 and also Posterior Analytics 73a 35f. As already mentioned, this chapter in A is devoted to a discussion of the various ways or senses in which X may be that kata which something is said of Y. X may be that kath'ho something is said or predicated in a number of different ways, and kathauto itself is pollachos legomenon. At I022a 29f., Aristotle uses the example of surface which is AEvK7) KaG' E'aVTrV. It is so described because a surface is the 'primary recipient' of colour; the surface is white Ka0' avr'Tv because 8'v av6l 8&EKTUat rpdOTrco. What Aristotle has in mind may be clearer if we consider the ordinary Greek use of kata with the accusative which supplies the basis for the technical use that we find in Aristotle, of 'kathauto' and 'kata sumbebekos'. It looks as if these technical uses of 'kata' derive from the use where it means something like 'in virtue of' or 'in respect of'. In that sense we can say that a physical object can be correctly called white in respect of its surface; it is something about its surface which makes it true to say of the object that it is white; hence the surface itself is called white, in a sense, in respect of itself; but in another sense, of course, it is not the surface, but some feature or characteristic which it possesses which makes it a white surface. Nonetheless, on this line of thought, the predicate 'white' applies to a surface directly, as compared to the way in which it applies to a piece of ivory. (In fact Aristotle seems to be wrong in holding that only three-dimensional objects with surfaces can be coloured; we can after all describe rainbows and beams of light, or the sky, as coloured, where there does not seem to be any question of regarding the colour as a property of some surface. But that point is irrelevant for our present purposes.)



If my general interpretation is correct, if there are some predicates which apply to something kathauto, they will be predicates which apply to something in respect of itself, and that will be so in the strongest sense of 'kathauto' where that which a predicate is applied to and that in respect of which it is so applied are one and the same. Now if that to which a predicate is applied and that in respect of which it is so applied are the same, the predicate in question must be one which could never fail to apply to the thing in question; for it could fail to apply to the object concerned only if it were possible to distinguish the bearer of the predicate from the feature of character of that bearer which supplied a basis for the application; for it looks as if what Aristotle has in mind when he speaks of something's being true of a particular individual kathauto is the possibility of some predicate's holding in virtue of its being just that individual. So, as I suggested earlier, when he says that you are not mousikos kata sauton, what he has in mind is that you could cease to be mousikos and still persist as the same individual. If so, a logos of a thing's essence will specify what cannot cease to hold of an individual so long as it persists. In the case of Socrates, his essence will be the eidos because, in more recent terminology, that is the concept under which he is identified.

What I have said so far is perhaps fairly familiar; and of course it is full of difficulties. But I hope I have made it clear that the phrase kathauto can be given an explanation in terms of the theory of predication. I return to a discussion of the difficulties by continuing my elucidation of the arguments of c 4. As we saw, Aristotle disposes of an irrelevant sense of 'kathauto' in which a surface is said to be white kathauto. It is not immediately clear what this sense is. Ross, if I understand him correctly, takes Aristotle to be disposing of the suggestion that we might regard being a white surface as the essence of a surface, and refuting it by pointing out that it is tautological. But this seems a rather strange interpretation. If Aristotle has already established that white does not belong kathauto to a surface in the appropriate sense, why should anyone hope to avoid this difficulty by suggesting that white surface belongs kathauto to a surface? Exactly the same objection would apply as before, that a surface need not be, or could cease to be, a


174 M. J. WOODS

white surface. I think it makes much better sense to suppose Aristotle to be considering the suggestion that being white is the essence of white surface; although a surface can cease to be a white surface and still continue to exist as a surface, a white surface cannot go on existing as a white surface while ceasing to be white; so being white might be thought of as the essence of white surface. So I take 11. I8-I9 as saying 'nor is that which is composed of both (sc. white and surface) the same as being white, since it itself (sc. white) is included in addition'. In this way these lines attach smoothly to what precedes, since they answer an objector who tries to make white something which belongs to a subject kathauto in the relevant sense.

What the objector is doing is to treat white surface as if it were a species of surface, and then claim that being white will be its essence. Aristotle's objection is that, as it stands, the proposed definition is circular, because 'white' occurs both in definiens and in definiendum. However, in the succeeding lines, he suggests a way out of the difficulty by mentioning the possibility of defining white surface in terms of the physical properties of a surface which make it white; if a surface is white by being smooth, then being smooth will be the essence of white surface. In order to interpret him in this way we have to understand ',rc E'rfaveta AEVKij Etat' after "r'o' av'3r- Ka' (v'.

Here once again I part company with Ross. Ross says 'so that if to be a white surface is to be a smooth surface, then, though we are not told the essence of surface, it is implied that "to be white" and "to be smooth" are the same thing'. As I interpret the sentence, he is saying that if being a white surface is the same thing as being a smooth surface, being white and smooth will be the same thing as being a white surface. The phrasing is rather telescoped, but this reading makes the sentence more relevant to the surrounding argument, since he will still be concerned with the question of defining the essence of white surface, which his objector regards as being simply a species of surface. At the moment Aristotle is not quarrelling with the suggestion that white surface is a genuine species of surface, and is allowing the objector to avoid the circularity objection of 11. I8-I9; since a white surface is necessarily a smooth one, if the physical theory is correct, this property is



not one which a white surface could lose and still persist as a white surface, so being smooth would appear to be the essence of white surface.

If this reading of II 2I-22 is correct, we can understand why Aristotle immediately goes on to consider whether ovrvOEa Ka-ra' Tas aAas'a Karqyoptas have an essence at all. The reason is that he has left in the field the suggestion that white surface does have an essence (being smooth) and he now wishes to dispose of this by considering whether composites of objects consisting of substances in combination with an item from another category have an essence at all. Where he speaks of cvvOera Ka rTa -r4 as caAasa Kar)qyopktaS he is presumably appealing to an analogy between the way in which white man is a composite item, consisting of a substance and a quality, and the way in which an individual man is a composite of form and matter. He supposes that 'himation' is a synonym of 'white man' and asks whether it has an essence. One of the puzzling features of this stretch of argument is that Aristotle insists on using an invented example, when there are presumably any number of actual examples in Greek which he might have used, and would have served his purpose equally well. A hoplite is a man wearing heavy armour, and that would have done just as well as an example of a substance plus an accidental attribute. Perhaps he wanted to forestall any doubt about whether the logos of the expression was correctly given by supposing 'himation' to be defined by fiat as 'leukos anthropos'. If I am right, what Aristotle says here will apply similarly to the vast majority of things described by substantival expressions, since most of these will not qualify as genuine substance kinds. 'Man' stands for an eidos, but all the more specific substantival expressions will stand for composites of a substance with an accidental attribute. So the argument about 'himation' here has a wide application.

Clearly, if there are two senses in which something may fail to belong to a subject kathauto, this will be because the term kathauto has two senses. The first case is given as the case where someone, in trying to define 'white' proceeds to give the definition of white man. (I 029b 3I-33) The precise syntax of the sentence is not entirely clear, but it seems that the first half of the sentence should be interpreted as follows: 'In the one case,


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a thing is said to be what is being defined (sc. in this case, 'to be white') in virtue of its being attached to something else . . .'9 For light on what this means we may turn to the problem about snub-nose, which occupies chapter 5 of Z. At Io3ob i6, Aristotle says that such terms must be defined 'ek prostheseos', where the problem is that in the case of such terms, an adequate definition must mention not merely the property (in this case concavity) but specify the sort of substance that the property inheres in. Another way of putting that is to say that the definitions of such terms cannot content themselves with identifying what the word being defined designates. What is in question is the definition of 'snub-nosed' in its application to the property, not in its application to the substance having the property; and similarly with 'white', a term which has a dual application, giving rise to two different senses, both to the colour itself and to the substance which has the colour, as Aristotle notes at 103ib 22-28. But if the correct definition has to be of the form 'the property of being ... in such and such a kind of substance', the name will not be applied to the property on the strength of its being just the property that it is, i.e. in respect of its being itself, so to speak. And that will explain in what sense such definitions that involve 'addition' are not kathauto.

If all this is correct, we may naturally suppose that the second sense of 'kathauto', in which there is no 'addition' involved is that in which it has already been admitted that a term like 'musical' does not apply kathauto to a man. That being so, Aristotle is correct to say that 'white man' would be true kathauto of himation, so far as this argument goes.

However, at I O3oa 2f. Aristotle asserts roundly that white man lacks an essence, that an essence is something which is tode ti-a this. Since only substances are 'what this something is' (OiTep T&8r' Tt), only substances have essences. The conclusion that only things which are the eide of gene, i.e. substance-forms, have essences, is stated at Io3oa I I-I4. Later in the chapter he qualifies this statement by saying that other things than substances may have a horismos and therefore an essence, but in a secondary sense. But, as he says at Io3ob 4-6, the primary and unqualified use of the terms 'essence' and 'horismos' is in application to substances.



As I have already said, one of the things which is rather perplexing about the discussion of essence in these chapters is that he seems not to be interested in drawing any distinction, in the case of substances, between particular substances like Socrates, and the form or kind which he shares with Callias. If I am right in connecting the doctrine that some things are identical with their own essences with the notion of kathauto predication, we can understand his remark at Io3Ib 27 that the pathos or quality white is the same as its own essence by appealing to the fact that the term 'white' applies to a colour in respect of itself; it is correct to describe the colour white as 'white' on strength of its being just that colour; and similarly the term 'man' applies to the eidos on the strength of its being just that eidos. But if we consider the sentence 'Socrates is a man' do we not have the same reason for asserting that 'man' applies kathauto to Socrates, or so it appears. It looks as if we shall have to say that 'man' applies to Socrates in virtue of his possessing the form or belonging to the species, and this would seem to give a parallel reason for denying that the eidos is predicated kathauto of an individual man to the one that Aristotle offered for his denial that the term 'white' is applied kathauto to an individual man.

I want to suggest that Aristotle held that a statement like 'Socrates is a man' was, despite appearances, to be construed as a statement of identity. When we use a proper name like 'Socrates' to pick out an individual man, what we pick out is always the form; though we pick it out as it occurs in a particular piece of matter. The essence of Socrates is simply the form man, an essence which he shares with Callias. What distinguishes Socrates and Callias is their matter. Thus he says at I O34a 6-8: 'And when we have the whole, such and such a form in this flesh and in these bones, this is Callias or Socrates; and they are different in virtue of their matter (for that is different) but the same in form; for their form is indi- visible.' (Ross's translation.) Socrates and Callias are each identical with the form man and 'Socrates is a man' becomes a statement of identity. This doctrine is, of course, extremely paradoxical, but I am inclined to think that it is Aristotle's. It will make sense of A 1022a26-27: o KaAAlasg KaO' aV'rOv KaAAias' Kat to Tl Xv JEvaL KaAAia. The essence of Callias is the


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essence which he is-the name 'Callias' picks out that essence or form, though it picks it out in its occurrence in a particular piece of matter. When he says at I O34a 8 that the eidos is atomon, what he means is that eidos is not something divided up among particular things in the way in which the colour white is divided up among particular white things. Hence there is no question of a relation of methexis, or whatever, holding between the substances belonging to a species and the form which defines it. Aristotle is quite happy to use the term 'methexis' for the relation which holds between the colour white and particular white things (I o3oa I3: substance forms are not said KaTa ILErooX


a primary substance, and man and horse are called secondary substances (cf. Io32b 1-2). We can also explain along these lines his idea that forms are separate (xWpLara).

That Aristotle's theory of essence was developed in part with a view to avoiding difficulties of the Third Man kind is, I think, confirmed by the fact that in c 6, the chapter ostensibly devoted to a discussion of the question whether forms are the same as their essences, he discusses the matter with reference to the Platonic theory, and says that if we say that Forms are distinct from their essences, we are involved in an infinite regress. At IO32a 2f. he says that if the essence of unity is distinct from unity, there will be an infinite regress. The language used is reminiscent of the language of the Third Man argument. Given the distinction of substance from other categories, and the analysis of an individual substance into form and matter, Aristotle thought he could present a theory of predication which was immune to Platonic difficulties. Admittedly, the particular difficulties that are reflected in the Third Man regress required only that the non-Identity Assumption should not have been accepted by him in full generality; and that condition would have been met if Aristotle had simply contented himself with asserting the identity of the species-form with its own essence. However, it seems reasonable to suppose that the problems of the Platonic theory which clearly preoccupied Aristotle a good deal, play a large role in explaining how Aristotle came to develop his theory of kathauto predication. This theory of predication carried with it the notion of something's being said of a subject kathauto, in a number of different senses, which are distinguished in c4 of Metaphysics Z. Socrates is a man in respect of himself because man is what Socrates, in the fullest sense, is. When we trace Socrates' career through his life, what we are tracing is the form in its occurrence in the particular piece of matter that constitutes Socrates' body.

In order to grasp the way in which Aristotle conceived of the identity of Socrates, Callias, etc. with the form of the species, it may be illuminating to think of the relation between a (type)-word and its various occurrences. It is not natural to regard the relation between a token of a given word to the (type)-word itself as simply a special case of the relation of


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instance to sort: it is much more natural to suppose that when the same word occurs in several places in the course of a printed page that it is indeed the same word that is recognisable in its various occurrences.

Of course, much more needs to be said on the subject of Aristotle's mature theory of predication. A full discussion would require some discussion of how Aristotle would have regarded predications in which a form is assigned to its genus. In order to explain this it would be necessary to offer an interpretation of the doctrine that the genus is not something over and above the species belonging to it. 10 This in turn would require some understanding of Aristotle's baffling use of the matter-form model in chapter 6 in explaining the relation between a genus and its diferentiae. What I have attempted to do in this paper is simply to throw some light on a doctrine which makes its main appearance in the early chapters of Metaphysics Z.

FOOTNOTES

1 I follow the established practice of using 'essence' as a conventional translation of Aristotle's 'T 'i-v etvaL' and 'the essence of man' as a translation of such expressions as 'To av6porcw etvat'.

2 In 'The Platonism of Aristotle', British Academy Lecture I965 pp. I36-137 (reprinted in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action ed. P. F. Strawson). In a footnote, Owen raises doubts about how far the theory of predication, and the associated doctrine that the primary substances are species-forms rather than individuals, survives the discussion of the later chapters of Z.

3 I03oa 11-13. 4 cf. r IOO7a 33-b i8. Compare also Posterior Analytics I 22 83a 24-32. 5 Op. cit. 6 Cf. Gregory Vlastos 'The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides' in

Philosophical Review I 954. 7 Cf. Owen, op. cit. 8 I have in mind, of course, the recent work of Saul Kripke. 9 I think that '"pt'raL' is best taken as passive rather than middle,

despite the occurrence in the immediate context of the same verb used in the middle.

10 Cf. Z i3 Io38b 33-34-


Article Contentsp. 167p. 168p. 169p. 170p. 171p. 172p. 173p. 174p. 175p. 176p. 177p. 178p. 179p. 180

Issue Table of ContentsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 75 (1974 - 1975), pp. 1-247Front MatterThe Presidential Address: The Standard of Morals [pp. 1-12+12A-12E]Promises, Games and Institutions [pp. 13-31]Individual Liberty [pp. 33-50]Equality of Opportunity [pp. 51-68]Appearance, Identity and Ontology [pp. 69-76]Scepticism and the Regress of Justification [pp. 77-88]Lord Devlin's Morality and Its Enforcement [pp. 89-109]A Defence of Intuitionism [pp. 111-119]Wittgenstein and Physicalism [pp. 121-146]Finiteness and the Actual Language Relation [pp. 147-165]Substance and Essence in Aristotle [pp. 167-180]Portraits and Persons [pp. 181-200]How to Refer to Private Experience [pp. 201-213]The Truth in Relativism [pp. 215-228]

Substance and Essence in Aristotle

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