PHIL 100A Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Monism, Pre-Socratic Philosophy
Document Summary
He doesn"t explicitly arrive at the conclusion that they are one and the same. Book 7 begins at the puzzle of contradictory historical claims made by the pre-socratics of what the primary cause of being is. From here, aristotle deduces that being is substance and substance is essence. Early on, aristotle says that substance is spoken of in four cases; essence, the universal, the genus, and subject. These are all layers of articulation, one encompassed by the next; universals encompass everything); genus divides things into broad categories (animals, plants); and subject is the particulars within these cases of being (a man, a horse, a statue). The essence of a thing is what the thing is said to be in its own right (1029b15). So the essence is something not added to or taken away from, or presupposed by anything, and it is not a compound of form and matter, or any conditional qualities of a subject.
