Form and Predication in Aristotle’s Metaphysics

Abstract

One of the perennial questions in Aristotle’s metaphysics concerns the transition from the ontology of the earlier, logical works (the Organon), where the individual is primary substance, to the central books of the Metaphysics, where pride of place, and the term ‘primary substance’ now belong to form. The difference between the two viewpoints is centered around the different treatment each gives to the individual. In Aristotle’s early theory in the Categories, the criteria for determining what is most of all substance are all tied to two canonical forms of predication, relating a subject to its kinds (including, where the subject is a substance, to its substantial kinds), or in the case of a substance, to its accidents. But this analysis offers no technique for inquiring after the inner structure, if any, of the subjects it identifies as basic: individual substances such as the individual man or the individual horse (Categories 2, lb4–5). In the Metaphysics, the individual substance is treated very differently. An individual substance is an organized, structured entity of a certain sort, and is analyzed accordingly as a compound of matter and form. And of the three, matter, form, and compound, form is now primary substance.¹ So a primary substance may have a subject or substratum, but it is not itself a compound of form and substratum: no primary substance is “spoken of by way of one thing’s being in another, i.e. in something which is its subject as matter” (Z11, 1037b1–4).