A History of Mediaeval Jewish PhilosophyHusik, Isaac
ReligionJewish
A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy
Husik, Isaac
Philosophy, Jewish; Philosophy, Medieval
But Israeli does not seem to have grasped Aristotle's meaning, and
ascribes to him the notion that the soul is a separate substance
perfecting the natural body, which has life potentially, meaning by this
that bodies have life potentially before the soul apprehends them; and
when the soul does apprehend them, it makes them perfect and living
actually. To be sure, he adds in the immediate sequel that he does not
mean temporal before and after, for things are always just as they were
created; and that his mode of expression is due to the impossibility of
conveying spiritual ideas in corporeal terms in any other way. This
merely signifies that the human body and its soul come into being
simultaneously. But he still regards them as distinct substances forming
only a passing combination. And with this pretended Aristotelian notion
he seeks to harmonize that of Plato, which he understands to mean not
that the soul enters the body, being clothed with it as with a garment,
and then leaves it, but that the soul apprehends bodies by clothing them
with its light and splendor, and thus makes them living and moving, as
the sun clothes the world with its light and illuminates it so that
sight can perceive it. The difference is that the light of the sun is
corporeal, and sight perceives it in the air by which it is borne;
whereas the light of the soul is spiritual, and intelligence alone can
perceive it, not the physical sense.
Among the conceptual terms in the Aristotelian logic few play a more
important part than those of substance and accident. Substance is that
which does not reside in anything else but is its own subject. It is an
independent existence and is the subject of accidents. The latter have
no existence independent of the substance in which they inhere. Thus of
the ten categories, in which Aristotle embraces all existing things, the
first includes all substances, as for example, man, city, stone. The
other nine come under the genus accident. Quantity, quality, relation,
time, place, position, possession, action, passion--all these represent
attributes which must have a substantial being to reside in. There is no
length or breadth, or color, or before or after, or here or there, and
so on except in a real object or thing. This then is the meaning of
accident as a logical or ontological term, and in this signification it
has nothing to do with the idea of chance. Clearly substance represents
the higher category, and accident is inferior, because dependent and
variable. Thus it becomes important to know in reference to any object
of investigation what is its status in this respect, whether it is
substance or accident.
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