more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
Notoriously, Locke's filler for Descartes's geometrical matter, solidity, will not do, for that quality collapses on examination into a composite of the dispositional-cum-relational propery of impenetrability, and the secondary quality of hardness.
Gist of Idea
Locke's solidity is not matter, because that is impenetrability and hardness combined
Source
Howard Robinson (Perception [1994], IX.3)
Book Ref
Robinson,Howard: 'Perception' [Routledge 2001], p.220
A Reaction
I would have thought the problem was that 'matter is solidity' turns out on analysis to be a tautology. We have a handful of nearly synonymous words for matter and our experiences of it, but they boil down to some 'given' thing for which we lack words.
| 16687 | Bodies are three-dimensional substances [Aquinas] |
| 16684 | Impenetrability only belongs to the essence of extension [Descartes] |
| 16601 | Matter is not hard, heavy or coloured, but merely extended in space [Descartes] |
| 6518 | Matter can't just be Descartes's geometry, because a filler of the spaces is needed [Robinson,H on Descartes] |
| 13185 | Even if extension is impenetrable, this still offers no explanation for motion and its laws [Leibniz] |
| 16683 | Leibniz eventually said resistance, rather than extension, was the essence of body [Leibniz, by Pasnau] |
| 5615 | Extension and impenetrability together make the concept of matter [Kant] |
| 6519 | Locke's solidity is not matter, because that is impenetrability and hardness combined [Robinson,H] |