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What is a substance?






I'm offering a free history-of-philosophy lesson today.


One of the key questions of the early modern era in the western metaphysical tradition was: what is substance?


The word "substance" literally means "standing under." Think of it, in the simplest sense, as a thing about which other things are said, the subject of a sentence rather than the predicate or object. Thus, we say "the ball is red." We don't typically say, "redness includes the surface of this ball." The ball is the subject of the sentence because we think of IT as the substance, and various properties or relations attach to it.

But early modern philosophy involved a search for what is a true substance, the suspicion that the ordinary language idea of a subject (I just evoked) is not enough.

In Descartes' view, there are only three real substances in the world. There is God, there is matter, and there is mind. Each of these is defined by one attribute. God is defined by perfection, matter by extension, and mind by thought.

You might contrast this view with that of George Berkeley, who narrowed the list of substances down to two: God and mind. Or to Spinoza, who narrowed it down to only one -- matter and mind become attributes of Nature, otherwise known as God.

This gets us to the answer to our question in the headline.


Descartes saw himself as a thinking thing, that is, he saw himself as a manifestation of the substance Mind. He eventually decides (after his exercise in methodical doubt is done) that he can believe his body also exists, because God would not trick him about something like that. And God must exist because nonexistence would be an imperfection, and the essence, the defining attribute, of God is perfection.


But the question of how Descartes' mind interacts with his body becomes a great mystery. And that will do it for today.

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