This is the final paper for a graduate philosophy seminar called “Substance, Ancient and Modern.” The class was split into two parts. The first was taught by a professor of Classics who spoke about the Aristotelian conception of substance, and the second by a Philosophy professor who lectured on the early modern view of substance in Boyle, Locke and Hume.
To summarize the class, humans have been confused for a long time about the nature of our everyday experience. Specifically, why do there seem to be so many connections between objects in the world that are hard to reason about (before modern science)? Things we call by the same name (e.g. trees, rocks, water) seem to be linked because our sensations of them are similar. A birch tree looks like an oak tree looks like a pine tree. But what are those qualities that we can sense? How do they become instantiated in the world, and is there some sort of bare, quality-free substance on which the qualities depend but that we can’t sense?
Turns out, people have been thinking about that for a while. The ancient Greek philosophical tradition has much different ideas than we do today. But, their work influenced the early-modern Europeans grappling with similar questions.
The paper that I wrote focused on Locke’s ideas about essence, and used an epistemological move called “contextualism” to argue that sometimes it’s not right to say that something “has” a quality. You can download it here or read it below: