There really is a failure to recognize "substance" today

I happened to catch this tweet yesterday (graphic via Williams Briggs):

You hear this form of argument a lot these days. Humans are all different from each other (this is true, after all), therefore it doesn’t even make sense to talk about an entity named “humans” or “a human”. Why the word is meaningless!

Or, an example offered in philosophy courses (I think), “it is a property of dogs to have four legs”, you say. Any child would affirm this to be true, we all know what dogs are. Ah, but don’t you know, some dogs only have three! (This also is true, after all.) So you can’t say it is a property of dogs to have four legs! But continue this line of reasoning and you will reach a point where actually you can’t claim there is any property out there that properly belongs to “dog”, and shortly thereafter conclude that “dog” as a distinct substance or creature that we might mentally consider doesn’t really even exist.

Or, of course, the big example of our day, just what is a woman anyway? Apparently, whatever this thing is, we need more of them in positions of power and in various business enterprises and so on and so forth. But golly if we know what a woman is. Certainly there isn’t a single characteristic you could identify that properly belongs to “woman”, right?

A couple of books I’m reading at the moment

Such thoughts were on my mind because, at the moment, I’m reading two books that make the case that modern science operates with the philosophy of Aristotle assumed and required “in the background”, as it were. The two books are “Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete?” by C Robert Koons, and “Aristotle’s Revenge” by Edward Feser. Now importantly, I think both authors would say that scientists don’t actually need any working knowledge of Aristotle whatsoever to do their work, but nonetheless they naturally end up thinking in Aristotelian categories whether they would ever name them that or not.

Koons especially discusses the physical theory of quantum mechanics, and Feser’s book is broader. I will probably have additional comments about both in the future (I just started Feser’s book, and I think it will be more helpful).

Koons takes on what he calls “microphysicalism” as an errant view. Microphysicalism says that the only things that have what we might call real, substantial existence are the smallest things of all - protons, neutrons, electrons, and the like. Those are real substances, and virtually everything else you think of as a “thing” is not really a thing at all, it’s just an ever-changing collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Not only does such thinking grind against how we actually conceive the world, but Koons says that such a viewpoint also violates the theory of quantum mechanics. When you have what Koons calls a “thermal substance”, basically anything composed of many particles, the particle wavefunctions interact with each other and produce macroscopic objects whose properties are not reducible to the properties of individual protons and electrons. Ergo even from the science alone, he says, we may speak of the larger things as being truly new and different substances with their own properties, worthy of being considered (in a sense) independently of their smaller constituents.

And Feser would probably say - hey that’s great, but we don’t even need a knowledge of interacting wavefunctions to realize macroscopic objects are true substances. Let’s just grab an example shared by every chemistry teacher. Look, hydrogen is a substance, it’s a substance you can burn rather easily. And look, oxygen is a substance, it boils at -183°C. And water, which we all know is built of hydrogen and oxygen atoms… doesn’t have anything even close to either of those properties. Water is therefore a substance worthy of its own consideration, and humans were studying its properties long before we knew a thing about atomic theory, and we were right to do so. (And then, although I’m not going to elaborate upon this right now, both Koons and Feser would say that hydrogen and water are not “actually” present in water, because water has properties and causal powers not reducible to those of hydrogen and oxygen. But they do exist “virtually” in the water - they are there, but not there in the same way they would be if they were on their own.)

“But what about that three-legged dog, Dr. Feser?” Well, it’s a damaged or defective instance of a dog, is all. But it doesn’t follow from this fact that it is false to claim that “has four legs” is a property of dogs, or that “a dog” is not even a well-defined object worthy of our consideration. Of course dogs have four legs and of course one may properly speak of “a dog” (and then the application of such thinking to sex is obvious).

---