Discussing substantiality in several groups. Aristotle, in book Z of the Metaphysics, takes substance to mean essence, or universal, or genre, or substratum (hypokeimenon). Antirealism about substantiality, I take, is a roughly nominalistically inspired position that could reject substance in these four meanings. I think it amounts basically and more typically to the denial either of ousia in the sense of what persists with the change of qualities within time (what travels in time, say, to the next moment in the future) or hypokeimenon in the sense of what persists with the change of qualities within possible worlds (what travels to other possible worlds). In the first sense, we have, for instance, actual entities, as in Whitehead, entities devoid of substantiality that, therefore, become something else at each moment while nothing perseveres. The second case, we have, for instance, counterparts, as in David Lewis, where whatever exists persists only within a world (much as in Leibniz&
A blog around metaphysics as a project and its cosmopolitical import. It favors a broad, non-parochial, multidimensional and thoroughly poly-stylistic image of philosophy.