1 - John West
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Three Essential Distinctions
Time to draw some distinctions.
The first is between a's essence and a. a's essence is identical with a. a is identical with a's essence. No matter how you slice it, they're the same thing. (a's essence encompasses all of what a is.)
The second is between a's essence and its substantial form (natural kind). a's essence is what a is; a's substantial form is the natural kind-universal that is a constituent of a. “a's essence” (a) includes its particularity, and we more or less come to know it through the senses; a's substantial form doesn't include a's particularity, and has to be abstracted from that which we acquire through the senses. If you muddle this distinction, you're going to run into questions like “How do we know x individual's essence?”
The third is between a's essence and a's existence. a's essence is just a. a's existence (says Thomism) is something additional to a (e.g. Barry Miller's existence property). The result is that there is a (real) distinction between a and existing a.[1]
Next time you catch someone conflating one of these distinctions, link this thread.
[1]Strictly speaking, we encounter existing a and a is an abstraction from it (in the appropriate sense of "abstraction").
- Proclus
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
It may also be helpful to further distinguish within your second point between (i) the substantial form qua universal, (ii) the substantial form instantiated in a particular, and (iii) the substantial form qua divine idea or transcendent Platonic Form.
Keeping these straight can help to clarify some of the miscommunication that occurs between Aristotelians, Platonists, and Thomists since all three groups frequently use "form" as a key term in arguments without specifying which sense they mean.
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
Also, a good piece of reading on the first distinction within the context of Aristotle's Metaphysics is:
Ronna Burger's "Is Each Thing the Same as Its Essence"
- John West
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
Proclus wrote:
It may also be helpful to further distinguish within your second point between (i) the substantial form qua universal, (ii) the substantial form instantiated in a particular, and (iii) the substantial form qua divine idea or transcendent Platonic Form.
Thanks. Just to make sure, your point is that (ii) and (iii) are both universals, but (ii) is immanent and (iii) transcendent?
(On the other reading of (ii), it refers to individual substantial forms (also called particularized kinds, kind-instances, kind-tropes, or kind-modes).)
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Thread Starter- Jeremy Taylor
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
My understanding is a transcendent Platonic form is not a universal. That is at least Lloyd Gerson's argument.
- Proclus
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
Yes, Gerson's view (on this point at least) is mine as well. Whatever turns out to be the best interpretation of Plato, however, it at least makes sense to distinguish conceptually "substantial form" considered simply as a universal and considered as a particular eternal paradigm (whether this is conceived as an idea in the mind of God as we see it from Alcinous on or whether it is conceived simply as an eternally separable Form).
Edit: I should perhaps say a word about how I do understand Plato, although I don't wish to hijack the topic. As I read him, concrete particulars are what they are in virtue of participating in an eternal Form. To take an example from the Parmenides, all like things are like in virtue of participating in the Like. Hence "likeness in us" (sense ii) is distinct from "likeness itself by itself" (sense iii). If we take all the particular likes we have the class of likes and can therefore identify by abstraction their common feature (sense i). A failure on the part of Young Socrates to distinguish sense (i) and sense (iii) leads to the famous likeness regress at Parmenides 132d.
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- John West
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
Yes, Gerson's view (on this point at least) is mine as well. Whatever turns out to be the best interpretation of Plato, however, it at least makes sense to distinguish conceptually "substantial form" considered simply as a universal and considered as a particular eternal paradigm.
I agree. I was just trying to make sense of the distinction between your (i) and (ii).
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Thread Starter- John West
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
I should perhaps say a word about how I do understand Plato, although I don't wish to hijack the topic.
Hah. Don't worry too much about “hijacking the topic”. Conversations don't happen in straight lines.
As I read him, concrete particulars are what they are in virtue of participating in an eternal Form. To take an example from the Parmenides, all like things are like in virtue of participating in the Like. Hence "likeness in us" (sense ii) is distinct from "likeness itself by itself" (sense iii). If we take all the particular likes we have the class of likes and can therefore identify by abstraction their common feature (sense i). A failure on the part of Young Socrates to distinguish sense (i) and sense (iii) leads to the famous likeness regress at Parmenides 132d.
Would you, for example, say that the three perfectly similar red things, a, b, and c, are all red in virtue of standing in a relation (participation) to the eternal Form of Red? Or would you say that a, b, and c, are “ontologically structured” and have something else “in” them that stands in the relation of participation with the eternal Form of Red?
(I'm assuming you give the same analysis to both properties and natural kinds.)
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Thread Starter- Proclus
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
Would you, for example, say that the three perfectly similar red things, a, b, and c, are all red in virtue standing in a relation (participation) to the eternal Form of Red? Or would you say that a, b, and c, are “ontologically structured” and have something else “in” them that stands in the relation of participation with the eternal Form of Red?
The latter. All red things have an immanent λόγος that constitutes their redness, probably a particular molecular structuring that disposes the object to reflect certain kinds of light. We can think about this both in terms of the particular structure in this particular object and the structural isomorphism that obtains across all instances of the kind. The particular molecular configuration in virtue of which this apple is red may be different from the particular configuration in virtue of which this crayon is red, but we can also identify the universal feature that they share independent of the particulars of it's instantiation. Another example of this would be the idea that Microsoft Word is the same program on my solid state drive and on your disk drive despite the important difference in the ways that this structure is encoded in different media. Neither of the immanent redness nor the universal quality, however, is the Form of Red (incidentally, Plato does not typically speak about Forms of non-relational sensible properties). If there is a Form of Red it is certainly not a spatiotemporal sensible object and hence it has no color. It would therefore not be a perfect exemplar of redness (a view mistakenly attributed to Plato with some frequency). Instead it would be the intelligibility of the λόγος we see in red things, or in other words, what it means to be red. This intelligible standard is eternal, immutable, and logically prior to our intellectual act of apprehending a thing as red (hence it is not a human mind-dependent concept or "idea" although it may be a divine mind-dependent idea).
A good piece of reading on this score is:
Alexander Nehamas, "Self-Predication and Plato's Theory of the Forms."
(I'm assuming you give the same analysis to both properties and natural kinds.)
Yes, I do, although it is somewhat difficult to say that Plato himself does. He rarely speaks of Forms of natural kinds. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a passage in the Parmenides in which the Young Socrates alludes to a Form of Man and the Form of Bed at the end of Republic (although this is an artificial kind, which makes it especially troubling). Typically, Plato restricts himself to two kinds of Forms (i) normative kinds, e.g. the Good, the Just, the Beautiful and (ii) relational kinds, e.g. the Like, the Different, the Large, the Small, the Equal, the Same, and the Different. Being (τὸ εῖναι) and the True are special cases.
- John West
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Re: Three Essential Distinctions
I hope you don't mind more questions. I find it helps to have some context for interpreting people's posts, later on:
All red things have an immanent λόγος that constitutes their redness, probably a particular molecular structuring that disposes the object to reflect certain kinds of light.
I'm inclined to say that red is a power to cause certain perceptions in normal perceivers under normal conditions (whether it's an irreducible power or reducible to certain microstructures is a separate issue).
Neither of the immanent redness nor the universal quality, however, is the Form of Red (incidentally, Plato does not typically speak about Forms of non-relational sensible properties).
It helps to draw a distinction between universals and property-tropes. It's a truism that each universal is strictly identical—both qualitatively and numerically identical—in each of its instances; in contrast, property-tropes of the same type are only qualitatively identical. It looks like you're saying each red thing* has a property-trope of a certain type and that the tropes' respective universal provides the “intension” (to use overly linguisticist lingo) of that respective type.* Is that right?
If not, could you say a bit more about the difference between the "immanent redness" and the "universal quality". (Feel free to assume that redness is an irreducible property to simplify exposition. Ignore the problem of colour.)
If there is a Form of Red it is certainly not a spatiotemporal sensible object and hence it has no color. It would therefore not be a perfect exemplar of redness (a view mistakenly attributed to Plato with some frequency). Instead it would be the intelligibility of the λόγος we see in red things, or in other words, what it means to be red.
Standard question for the second horn of my dilemma: why not just say the tropes are perfectly similar or, if the above interpretation is right, stop at the universals? The Forms seem superfluous.
*It's probably worth flagging that I'm assuming we're talking about a specific, completely determinate shade of red, not the determinable red.
*This would be similar to Husserl's position, though Husserl would call tropes “moments”.
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