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Download Full Book Ideas about Substance Hammond, Albert L. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Hammond, Albert L. Ideas about Substance. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.72710. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/72710 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 03:26 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Albert L. Hammond Ideas about Substance Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3696-8 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3696-5 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3694-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3694-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3695-1 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3695-7 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. IDEAS ABOUT SUBSTANCE SEMINARS IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS Editorial Board George E. Owen Neville Dyson-Hudson George Boas Earl R. Wasserman Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea Delbert R. Hillers Ideas About Substance Albert L. Hammond Vox Populi: Essays in the History of an Idea George Boas IDEAS ABOUT SUBSTANCE ALBERT L. HAMMOND � THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS • BALTIMORE COPYRIGHT @ 1969 BY THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS BALTIMORE, MARYLAND 21218 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 69-13537 STANDARD BOOK NUI\IBER 80 I 8-1012-4 ( CLOTHBOUND EDITION) STANDARD BOOK NUl\!BER 8018-1013-2 (PAPERBACK EDITION) ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED, 1969 JOHNS HOPKINS PAPERBACKS EDITION, 1969 To Virginia, without whom not Ill at press time, the author is especially grateful for the editorial help of his wife, Victor Lowe, Victoria Lincoln Lowe, John Young, and the Press. CONTENTS Publisher's Note, ix Preface, xi Chapter I. Pre-Socratic Pre-emptions, I Chapter II. Athenian Elaboration, 26 Chapter III. Cartesian Simples, 66 Chapter IV. The English Way of Ideas, 92 Chapter V. Phenomenalism and Postphenomenalism, 117 Index, 143 PUBLISHER'S NOTE The history of ideas as a form of scholarly inquiry took shape at The Johns Hopkins University in the first half of the century. The man chiefly responsible was Arthur 0. Lovejoy, whose twenty-eight years as professor of philosophy were spent promoting the historiography of the intellect. With two colleagues, George Boas and Gilbert Chinard, he founded the History of Ideas Club, where, in an atmosphere at once congenial and critical, visiting scholars might offer their interpretations of the development of the great ideas that have influenced civilization. Lovejoy was instrumental in founding the Journal of the History of Ideas in pursuit of the same end. And in his own writings he persistently and patiently charted the transformations which a seminal idea might undergo-over time, across disciplines, or within the intellectual development of an individual thinker. When, with Carnegie Corporation support, The Johns Hopkins University inaugurated an imaginatively new pro­ gram of adult education in 1962, it was a happy inspiration to build it around a set of graduate seminars in the history of ideas; for the History of Ideas Club itself had long before been described as "a sort of seminar where mature men and women learned new and valuable lessons." To be sure, this evening program has followed Lovejoy's spirit of inquiry rather than his own actual practice. Not all the seminars are concerned to pursue in detail the transformations of a single unit-idea. Rather, there is a shared view that no the­ ory-at any time, in any field-is simply self-generated, but that it springs by extension or opposition from earlier the­ ories advanced in the field, or is borrowed from theories in cognate fields, or is derived from the blending of hitherto X / PUBLISHER'S NOTE separate fields into one. To pursue the unfolding of any theory in these terms ( so the teachers in the seminars be­ lieve) allows a sophisticated and rigorous discussion of con­ temporary scholarship with an audience lacking previous specified knowledge. These notions are an extension, not an abuse, of Lovejoy's concern; he had never wasted effort on being unduly prescriptive except to call, hopefully, for cooperative scholarship in a venture so clearly beyond the reasonable capabilities of a single scholar. This series of books, Seminars in tlle History of Ideas, is intended to provide a wider audience with a chance to participate in "a sort of seminar" similar to those in the Uni­ versity's program. Just as the teaching seminars themselves draw on the spirit rather than merely the letter of Love­ joy's original enterprise, so this published series extends be­ yond those topics already offered in the University's program. But all, nonetheless, reflect that intent with which Lovejoy so long persisted in his own work: "the endeavor to investi­ gate the history, and thereby, it may be hoped, to understand better the nature, of the workings of the human mind." PREFACE The Animals They Come One By One During the long years the Yankees were winning the pennants I used to ask Yankee lovers, or occasionally a Yankee hater, what it was he supposed he was admiring or deploring. The owners changed, the front office changed, the ground crew changed, managers, coaches, and of course play­ ers came and went. What was it that always won? One answer, not as bad as some, was that the pinstripes stayed. Yes, and the pinstripes did something. But a day came when the pinstripes lay inert on the shoulders, and the Yankees were just another ball club. A more dangerous attack on man's reality was from the other side: not from the collection to which he belongs but from the ultimate very-little materials that are parts of him. This attack was classically mounted by Democritus: All is atoms in the void, plus their supervenient arrangements, ar­ rangements of which neither the atoms nor the void has any care, pride, or record. We escaped this through the sophistica­ tion of Athens, especially the sagacity of Aristotle. Aristotle, known for his doctrine that the soul is the "form" of the living thing, could take time to be derisive of Socrates' reincarnating soul; but he makes it clear that the soul must be the form of a living thing and that any mere arrangement of atoms ( which he calls the doctrine of Democ­ ritus) cannot be soul, life, knowledge, goodness, or indeed anything except a spatial arrangement of atoms. And Aris­ totle makes this emphatic in what I take to be a most au­ thoritative statement of his basic position ( Parts of Animals, Book I). xii / PREF ACE But that was 2,300 years ago, and since the dominance of modern mathematical physics the attack has been renewed, constant; and the defense has been unsure. The defense, as often in modern philosophy, also suffers a bit of odd con­ fusion when the old-time chief defender turns up somewhat ambiguously as an enemy agent or perhaps double-agent. For several generations there has been an easy fashion, coming chiefly I think from Bertrand Russell and "general seman­ tics," of referring to Aristotelian logic and the subject-predi­ cate proposition as a semeiotic excuse for our believing so obviously an unanalyzed familiarity as that the names of our children stand for continuingly real and separate persons. And, indeed, the subject-predicate Aristotelianism is also sometimes supposed to make us sure that when we have come into possession of a substantial subject we have some­ thing that cannot possibly change at all. I know Lord Russell has read Aristotle. But Lord Rus­ sell has a charming ability to read in a text, especially a great one, less and other than most of us. Some of the others, I often feel, are just using slogans. Aristotle there was. And he was a logician. So there is an Aristotelian logic. But I do not profess to know who now knows a very great deal about it. But Aristotle tells us a sub­ tance can be in the subject, cannot be predicated; and in the simplest sense is something like this man, or this horse. Its chief mark that it is a substance is that it can and does change. I think Aristotle is in danger of not being properly wary of the doctrine of the unchangingness of the predicate. This is Pythagoras, "the number theory of the idea," from which Aristotle dissociated himself in the Academy and of which he grew less wary once he was out of the controversy. Predicates as opposed to substances can be unchanging, and the glory of mathematical science probably rests on this. The number 2 PREF ACE / xiii is eternal and, with change for example, we can stipulate pre­ cision or set up a field-within-which so that what changes for Pythagoras is also changing for Robert Boyle or for Albert Einstein. Precision and abstraction are high mental abilities that we can, in the predicate, apply to the existent substances of the subject. (The common noun may do a similar trick in the subject.) But "I am tired" is a good subject-predicate proposition: and what is more changeable than the I or than the tiredness with which I am tired? That is a pleasant sen­ tence because when it is used the subject is necessarily a sub­ stance, the statement is true, and a somewhat different state­ ment is also being truthfully made: "I am at work." If I conclude, as I do, that the world is composed of substantial individuals, existing with the characters they actu­ ally have, with parts they actually have, and in the media of the relationships of time, space, and causal connections which they actually have, is it of great import where we allot the word "substance," as nearer part or whole? I am convinced it is.
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