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Full Idea
In the 'blueprint' approach to substance, we confront at least three questions: What is it for a thing to be an individual substance? What is it for a thing to be the kind of substance that it is? What is it to be that very individual substance?
Gist of Idea
We can ask for the nature of substance, about type of substance, and about individual substances
Source
Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J (Substance and Individuation in Leibniz [1999], 1.1.1)
Book Ref
Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J: 'Substance and Individuation in Leibniz' [CUP 1999], p.15
A Reaction
My working view is that the answer to the first question is that substance is essence, that the second question is overrated and parasitic on the third, and that the third is the key question, and also reduces to essence.
| 13068 | We can ask for the nature of substance, about type of substance, and about individual substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13069 | The general assumption is that substances cannot possibly be non-substances [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13071 | We can go beyond mere causal explanations if we believe in an 'order of being' [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13072 | Modern essences are sets of essential predicate-functions [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 17080 | Modern essentialists express essence as functions from worlds to extensions for predicates [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13076 | Scholastics treat relations as two separate predicates of the relata [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13081 | Even extreme modal realists might allow transworld identity for abstract objects [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13100 | Maybe 'substance' is more of a mass-noun than a count-noun [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13102 | If you individuate things by their origin, you still have to individuate the origins themselves [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13103 | Numerical difference is a symmetrical notion, unlike proper individuation [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13101 | Necessity-of-origin won't distinguish ex nihilo creations, or things sharing an origin [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| 13104 | Haecceity as property, or as colourless thisness, or as singleton set [Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |