In which I strive to be helpful, but probably fail

The beginning section of Aristotle's Metaphysics talks about the Philosopher as the one who has the most pure knowledge, since he is learning of the thing for the sake of learning itself, not for some material benefit. This question of, "Why Philosophy?" is picked up throughout history, folks like William James talk about Philosophers as (kind of) guides in decision making, Bertrand Russell echoes Aristotle, saying Philosophy should be studied for the "sake of the questions themselves," and Dewey points to the philosopher as the instrument in which we learn to think critically of all things. Perhaps my favorite statement, however, is Nietzsche's "What I understand by 'philosopher': A terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger."

The danger comes from the constant desire to understand, search, and critique; all of which work together to make the philosopher, as Aristotle points out, the best teacher. While I'm certainly no supreme philosopher, I do think the ability to teach is a good indication of ones comprehension of the material. So, with that starting point, allow me to try to help.

I read through all the recent blog posts this weekend (yeah, I do that because I actually like this stuff), and there seems to be a large amount of confusion on the principles of substance, both primary and secondary. Whether this results from the somewhat confusing terminology provided by Aristotle and discussed in class, or if it's the constant questions of that one kid that sits in the middle of the class that are tangential and probably not beneficial to the class, either way, confusions exists.

So for that, let me try to help (and again, my understanding has been proven wrong before, so don't take me as the end all, by any means).

Primary substance is the starting point, in Aristotle's conception. But what is it, exactly? It, according to the theme we've picked up on in class, is that which contains the essential characteristics that generally make up a thing. Confusing terminology, to be sure, but lets use an example to help sort it out. Primary substance will always be a particular thing, you, me, that girl over there, etc. Let's work with Socrates, since Aristotle does. The essential characteristics of Socrates are (as pointed out by Erin Echols, here) 1. The Ability to Reason and 2. The nutritive element (what we call the body).

It should be noted, here, that these essential characteristics are not solely physical. Second, it should be noted that they may not exist in every case, as we discussed in class 10-20. A mentally handicapped person may not be able to reason, but they are still human.

The way in which one defines what the essential characteristics are is secondary substance. This is, I think, where the vast amount of confusion hits our class. Secondary substance is derived by looking at primary substances and grouping them together, we refer to such groupings as Species. In the case of our example, Socrates is grouped into the Species "(Hu)Man." When we have grouped these primary substances together, we can look at them and determine what their commonalities and differences are. We then use these to define them, saying (something like) "See, all (or perhaps almost all) of these (hu)mans possess the ability to reason and physical bodies, this should be our definition."

The problem, here, is that the system is circular. To define primaries one needs secondaries, but to build secondaries one needs to group primaries.

One final word about characteristics.

The non-essential characteristics, those such as "tall, short, hot, cold, brown" etc, are not defined on the secondary level, instead they exist on the primary level. It is because they exist that essentials must be defined on the secondary level, since we cannot ever fully ascertain all of the non-essential characteristics of any particular, and it would be wrong to say that the just because a characteristic is displayed in one particular, it should be displayed in every particular of that species.

Maybe this helped, maybe not.