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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
In this paper I will combat the claim that concrete matter can exist independently of objecthood. This view is a denial of the Aristotelian principles that only particular objects (primary substances) exist apart (independently), and that as a condition of concreteness, matter must have acquired form. For, it propounds that matter can be concrete and general.
1 Aristotle, Metaphysics Zeta, 1028a32.
2 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, 320b13, 15.
3 Not in the sense of prime matter. The underlying matter is the object from which this one was made. See Metaphysics Zeta, 1034a5.
4 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, 319a21.
5 Aristotle, Physics, 193a8. Quotations from Aristotle are from the translations in The Works of Aristotle, ed. Ross, W. D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908).Google Scholar
6 Aristotle, Metaphysics Zeta, chap. 3.
7 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, 230b13.
8 Wiggins, D., “On Being at the Same Place at the Same Time”, Philosophical Review 77 (1968), 90–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Burke, M., “Cohabitation, Stuff and Intermittent Existence”, Mind 89 (1980), 391–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 For example, the anti-essentialist regarding kinds will say that the so-called structured object was a property, a particular form or arrangement of the portion of stuff; it was not anything different from the latter. So the destruction of a property or form is not the destruction of the portion of matter possessing it.
11 Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption, 319a21.
12 See Laycock, Henry, “Some Questions of Ontology”, Philosophical Review 81 (1972). 3–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For this particular claim see 5, 6, and 26.
13 Though the main discussion is centred around the milder claim, both theses are advanced in Laycock's paper. For example, on 32 he says this: “The way in which stuff persists is different … from the persistence of things; stuff can change its kind. Snow becomes water, lead may become uranium, and so forth, whereas dogs can hardly become lizards. Stuff-concepts are more like sortal phase-concepts than like straight sortals”.
14 Ibid., 26: “Stuff like water is, I shall maintain, concrete but non-particular, though it often occurs in particular things like lakes, rivers and bottles.”
15 Cf. Ibid., 27: “Things often decompose, disintegrate ordegenerate not so much into other things as into stuff of some kind (forexample, dust, clay, smoke, compost), and such stuff seems to have a more fundamental ontological status than the things themselves …. We can and do think of stuff itself as having an independent reality…”. “The stuff of which a thing is made can exist independently of the thing which it makes up.”
16 Ibid., 27–28, 38: “To say, for example, that there is gold in a certain region is certainly to assert the existence of something, but it is not… to assert or imply the existence of any ‘gold-particulars’ (bits or pieces of gold). It is not a necessary condition of the truth of the claim that there is gold in a certain region, that there should be any bits or pieces of gold in that region” (27–28).
17 Contrast Aristotle in 319a21 (fn. 11) and Laycock, “Some Questions”, 27: “Things often decompose, disintegrate or degenerate not so much into other things as into stuff of some kind”.
18 “This cube may be destroyed …. But the sugar itself will not be destroyed by such processes. It will remain, scattered about or dissolved in the water. The existence of the sugar itself cannot be terminated by the simple sorts of means by which we may terminate the existence of items whose existence and identity is bound up with their spatiotemporal continuity—that is particular objects” (Laycock, , “Some Questions”, 27).Google Scholar
19 Ibid., 30.
20 Ibid., 29.
21 See, for example, Price, M., “Identity Through Time”, The Journal of Philosophy 74 (1977), 21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Coburn, R.. “Identity and Spatiotemporal Continuity”, in Munitz, Milton, ed., Identity and Individuation (New York: New York University Press, 1971), 92–93Google Scholar; Smart, B., “How Not to Reidentify the Parthenon”, Analysis 33 (1972), 63–64Google ScholarPubMed; Salmon, Natham, “How Not to Derive Essentialism from the Theory of Reference”, The Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979), 717–718CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burke, M., “Cohabitation”, 391.Google Scholar
23 “The water as such is not a distinct thing but if one thinks of ‘the water in the bottle’ as the singular term designating the water just as long as it is in the bottle, then there is an obvious and trivial sense in which the water in the bottle is distinct from the rest of the world. The water in a bottle, so described, gets its distinctness by proxy, as it were, from the bottle; but not so described it has no criteria of distinctness at all” (Laycock, , “Some Questions”, 31).Google Scholar
24 Kripke's original formulation is in “Naming and Necessity” in Davidson, D. and Harman, G., eds., Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), 350–351CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Salmon, , “How Not to Derive”, 71 Iff.Google Scholar; McGinn, C., “On the Necessity of Origin”, The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), 127–135CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noonan, H., “The Necessity of Origin”, Mind 92 (1983), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forbes, G., The Metaphysics of Modality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), chap. 6.Google Scholar
25 “Suppose the water is poured into a jug, first from one bottle and then from (an)other. The water we refer to as having been in the first bottle is then undoubtedly in the jug, but is clearly not distinct from the water which was previously in the second bottle” (Laycock, , “Some Questions”, 31).Google Scholar
26 Cf. Salmon, N., “How Not to Derive”.Google Scholar
27 Laycock, , “Some Questions”, 30.Google Scholar
28 “‘There is water here’ becomes ‘There are water elements here’. This does not imply ‘There is a body of water here’, for although each water-element is a body, it is not a body of water, since it does not consist of water-elements” (ibid., 38); “… a water molecule is not water, and neither is a part of such a molecule a part of water. Water requires a plurality of water molecules; we cannot pour or boil or freeze a water molecule. It is a thing, while water is stuff. Water may be water molecules, but it is hardly a water molecule” (ibid., 23).
29 Cf. footnote 28: We cannot indeed pour, boil or freeze a single water molecule. Such operations require a plurality of such molecules: they require water as stuff. A water molecule is not stuff. Nevertheless it would not be sound to argue that since water is stuff, and a water molecule is not stuff, then the water molecule is not water. The conclusion is absurd for it would be a miracle for the mere multiplicity of them to be water. What we learn from this absurdity is that water is not only stuff but also the essential constituent object of this stuff. So, a water molecule is water but not water as stuff. A stuff-element is a body of that stuff, though not a body made of that stuff.
Then, what of blood or granite? Is the greater part of the world not made of such composite stuff? So, is a blood-element blood? There surely is no element of blood which is itself blood. But this is not because what can be isolated as a blood element is not blood. The reason is that no such isolation is possible: there are no blood-elements (molecules) in the sense there are water-elements. Blood is made of a plurality of elements, each different in kind, and only a mixture of them is blood. But then, in the same sense, blood is not a stuff-kind; it is a compost of stuff-kinds.
30 Both (a) and (b) imply that the disjunct propositions constituting the consequent are about entities same in kind as the entity denoted by the antecedent. Therefore (c) is as specific as (a), and moreover (e) can be inferred validly from (c) and (d) by Modus Tollens.
31 A shorter version of this paper was read at the 18th World Congress of Philosophy (Brighton, United Kingdom) in August 1988. The author thanks A. Karatay and V. Taylor-Saclio
lu for helpful comments.
