ABSTRACT
The view of a material world composed of inert entities that was fostered by the scientific revolution represented an epochal shift in cosmology, but in a sense Aristotelianism had already contained the seeds of its own destruction. In setting up his doctrine of substance, Aristotle had effectively denied the possibility of a category of Being in general. For Aristotle, each instance of formed matter was a substance, while all other conceivable entities are the qualities or attributes of substances – colour, quantity, time, and so on. Being is either ‘being a substance of a particular kind’ or ‘being the attribute or quality of a substance’, and these kinds of being cannot be reduced to each other. Similarly, the being of one kind of substance cannot be substituted for that of another, even if they are linked by resemblance or analogy. If the kind of existence attributable to one type of phenomenon is distinct from that of any other, then there can be no overarching sense of Being. In consequence, the inherent unity of the world that scholasticism promoted was fragile, and would eventually unravel into a vision of separate and free-standing entities (Frede 1993: 60). This is the source of our
contemporary conviction that if we know about objects then we know about Being.
