Substance

‘Substance’ is a term within metaphysics that is really hard to define - and that is precisely what the debate surrounding it attempts to do. Taking a standard view, substance is ‘something’ which underlies a thing’s properties. For example, we may recognize that a blue wooden block and a red wooden block are of the same substance because they both share the same underlying material. The concept of substance is also useful in this way to distinguish between what a thing substantially is (i.e. what its true essence is), and what its accidental properties are. If we deny that a blue wooden block has that underlying material substrata, then we get no closer to knowing what the thing’s necessary essence is. We are then left with a bundle of properties that form a ‘blue wooden block’, and we are only able to loosely and abstractly identify that block with another one by inferring their similarity- since they don’t really share anything substantially the same. Thus, the long-lasting debate within metaphysics is what exactly substance as a whole is - for example, is all substance formed out of physical material? How exactly does a thing’s accidental or contingent (or non-essential) properties relate to its necessary or essential substance? There are many epistemological concerns as well - since, as many philosophers have pointed out, we only seem to interact with the non-essential properties in the world, so, are we even able to know what anything really is? The term substance is also used more generally to describe particular things.