Hi Gregory, I'm taking a philosophy 101 course online right now and I just wanna say that these videos have saved my life, thank you for speaking like a person and not a confusing old book lol

Incredibly helpful. You are a very good teacher. Thank you!

I feel like half of my philosophy profs don't actually want us to figure this stuff out. They often word it in a way that is more confusing than the text and I genuinely don't understand why. You make everything so clear!

Thanks a lot Greg! Great explanations!!! God bless!!

Hey, I’m taking Coursera’s Aristotle course, and this has deacribed and helped so well. My brain works on concrete examples, but the overused man and white was not enough, but your lecture helped. THANK you!!! 🌟

Thank you. This is helpful.

Thank you sir

Thank you

Hi professor, Something that’s stumped me for a while is the characterization of ‘species’ as having a fixed character (i.e., being once removed from the primary substance). Going back to your ‘hammer’ example, if there were to be a specialization of the practice of hammering, thus resulting in various kinds of hammers (e.g., sledge, ball-peen, claw, etc.) would these, then, become species? If so, wouldn’t ‘hammer’ then become a genus? Does Aristotle or anybody after him deal with this problem? Thanks for the video!

If I should not make this question, please let me know, but I am curious. If primary substances are one while secondary substances are many(because the rest are instances or predicates of that substance), what does that play with the notion of Being? I understand that's not Aristotle's scope, but I wonder how both philosophical views play alongside each other? If all entities are a fragmentation of a unitarian Being, per the pre-socratics, and the "beingness" of entities is because of a participation of Beingness Itself, then Being Itself would be the primary substance, and the rest secondary substances, would they not? How does that play along with, for example, individual human beings? Am I a primary substance(which is how I seem to myself) or am I a secondary substance in relation to Being Itself as the primary and One substance(as it seems to me, following both lines of thought).

Hello Dr. Sadler. If primary substance is this human and secondary substance is human as a species or animal as a genus does that mean that I'm made of 2 substances, both my own primary substance and the secondary substance of human? Does that mean each thing is a composite of 2 substances ?

hi gregory, but what is aristotle's aim when he is diving substances to primary and secondary? if there is not any aim then I don't understand how we can adapt this information into our lives, into our understanding of the world etc. ? it seemed to me like it is diving unicorns to 2 different groups :D

Hi Gregory. Do you believe this theory of substance still has any remaining worth? Or has Locke's substratum made it redundant?

Great lecture. Pretty funny mistranscription by KZfaq at 2:00 - 2:13… “…species and genera these are actually coming from Latin terms in a spec AIDS and gayness which are translating a dose and gayness and these these are going to be used quite a bit.” Like, what?!?!

Hey Dr. Sadler, how can there be such a thing as secondary substance if substance can't be in or of something?

That last idea confused me: whether if one human being left in the universe would be both the species and the individual, both the same thing. You said that an individual human is not the same thing as the species and that we could at least conceive of other human beings existing or remember that they had existed in the past. But earlier, regarding the Dodo, you mentioned that using such mental constructs of the species is not the same thing as the actual species because it’s something that describes the species and is not the species itself. I’m confused as to whether it’s plausible for the last remaining individual substance of its kind to become both individual and species.

So then would wood itself be a primary substance? And what if the wood is turned into a table would that still be a primary substance? Or would the tree were both generated from be the primary substance and then wood and the table be secondary substance?

Still dont understand what the secondary substance is

I have not yet formally studied Aristotle, however I can say he is the only philosopher that I look up to, i.e., the only one who has built a complete and logically coherent system starting from a point of view that he and I (and all individuals) have in common: common sense. Most great philosophers start on the level of abstractions, while Aristotle starts with the senses. Starting from the senses, Aristotle moves in one direction to theoretically explain reality, and in the opposite direction to explain man's practical relationship to reality. Understanding that much about Aristotle, here is my comment on this video presentation. I personally think that primary substance is--to put it in modern terms--what we call energy, it is that which exist absolutely, as the unmoved mover. Secondary substance is energy as manifested as structure and action which is what we today call matter. We understand energy to be that which is "in" the thing, or what Aristotle called the "species". Matter, unlike energy, admits to having the attributes of quality, quantity, place, displacement, change, relationships and other Aristotelian categories. These categories then used for identifying a thing, i.e., for differentiating one thing from another. What we call "knowledge", is to speak of the identity of material things as the "predication of the subject". What is in the subject is its energy. But what is predicated/knowable of the subject, is the identification of its attributes. Consciousness is a process of identifying the attributes of things that exist in reality. The identity of a thing which does not exist is to falsify reality. And even though we cannot know a thing "in" itself as it exist in reality, we can, nevertheless know a thing by its categories: its quality, its quantity, its position, its displacement, and its relationships with other things. In short, we can know how it manifest itself. A thing's qualities identify its species in reality and its differentiation in the mind. It's quantities identify its genera in reality and it's integration in the mind. It's place and displacement identify it's action in reality and it's potential behavior as predictable in the mind. Thus, what can be said about a thing, (i.e., predicated about a thing) is something about it's "being" or about it's "action" which correlates with reality. Identifying the "being" of a thing is mostly a process of deductive logic (mental acts of prior knowledge). Identifying the "action" of a thing is mostly a process of inductive logic (mental acts of posterior knowledge). Of course, my interpretation is only the effort of a beginner, but the purpose of my comment is to demonstrate that understanding Aristotle requires one to think for himself. Yet, all other philosophers require the student to enter into that philosopher's mind while leaving one's own mind behind.