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Aristotle used the term "substance" (Greek: οὐσία ousia) in a secondary sense for genera and species understood as hylomorphic forms.Primarily, however, he used it with regard to his category of substance, the specimen ("this person" or "this horse") or individual, qua individual, who survives accidental change and in whom the essential properties inhere that define those universals.
For Aristotle, a "substance" (ousia) is an individual thing—for example, an individual man or an individual horse. [60] Within every physical substance, the substantial form determines what kind of thing the physical substance is by actualizing prime matter as individualized by the causes of that thing's coming to be.
For Aristotle, both matter and form belong to the individual thing (hylomorphism). Aristotle's theory of universals is Aristotle's classical solution to the problem of universals, sometimes known as the hylomorphic theory of immanent realism. universals are the characteristics or qualities that ordinary objects or things have in common.
In terms of Aristotle's theory of four causes, a material's non-accidental potential is the material cause of the things that can come to be from that material, and one part of how we can understand the substance (ousia, sometimes translated as "thinghood") of any separate thing.
In Aristotle's estimation, an explanation without the temporal actuality and potentiality of an infinite locomotive chain is required for an eternal cosmos with neither beginning nor end: an unmoved eternal substance for whom the Primum Mobile [note 2] turns diurnally, whereby all terrestrial cycles are driven by day and night, the seasons of ...
Aristotle made a distinction between the essential and accidental properties of a thing. Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic theologians have employed the Aristotelian concepts of substance and accident in articulating the theology of the Eucharist , particularly the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood.
Plato is depicted pointing upwards, in reference to his belief in the higher Forms, while Aristotle disagrees and gestures downwards to the here-and-now, in reference to his belief in empiricism. The topic of Aristotle's criticism of Plato's Theory of Forms is a large one and continues to expand. Rather than quote Plato, Aristotle often summarized.
Aristotle examines the concepts of substance (ousia) and essence (to ti ên einai, "the what it was to be") in his Metaphysics (Book VII), and he concludes that a particular substance is a combination of both matter and form, a philosophical theory called hylomorphism.