TITLE:
History of Substance in Philosophy
AUTHORS:
Bassey Samuel Akpan, Charles Clement Odohoedi
KEYWORDS:
Substance, Attributes, Metaphysics, Complimentary Reflection
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.5 No.5,
December
30,
2016
ABSTRACT: A lot of words investigated by philosophers get
their inception for conventional or extra-philosophical dialect. Yet the idea
of substance is basically a philosophical term of art. Its employments in
normal dialect tend to derive, often in a twisted way, different from its
philosophical usage. Despite this, the idea of substance differs from philosophers,
reliant upon the school of thought in which it is been expressed. There is an ordinary
concept in play when philosophers discuss “substance”, and this is seen in the concept of object, or thing when this is
contrasted with properties, attributes or events. There is also a difference in view when in the sense
that while the realists would develop a materialistic theory of substance, the
idealist would develop a metaphysical theory of substance. The problem
surrounding substance spans through the history of philosophy. The queries have
often been what is substance of? And can there be substance without its
attributes? This paper tends to expose the historical problems surrounding
substance. This paper criticizes the thinking which presupposes that there
could be a substance without its attributes or substance existing alone. This paper adopts complimentary ontology
principles which state that for anything to exist, it must serve as a missing
connection to reality. This suggests that everything interconnects to each other and substance
cannot exist in isolation.