Stuff versus individuals

LUCÍA LEWOWICZ; OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Bogotá

Congreso; Summer Symposium 2011 of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry; 2011

International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry

In his very interesting paper “Matter versus form, and beyond”, included in the volume Stuff. The Nature of Chemical Substances, Joachim Schummer stresses the deep difference between the chemical ontology and the physical ontology in terms of the opposition matter versus form. According to the author, the matter- or stuff-metaphysics assumes that the world consists of material stuffs or substances; then, the stuff-perspective is interested in the material composition of things. On the contrary, the form-metaphysics dematerializes the world by considering geometrical features as the only essential properties of bodies.             Schummer’s work has a mobilizing effect in the task of understanding the peculiar features of the macro-chemical ontology. Nevertheless, we think that those features are better captured by a different opposition. In this talk we will consider the difference between stuff-metaphysics versus individual-metaphysics; it is not a difference regarding the kind of properties taken into account in each ontological view (material versus geometrical properties), but a difference in the most basic ontological categories that structure the world.             In particular, we will argue that the stuff-metaphysics is completely different than the individual-metaphysics, and it still lacks an appropriate language for expressing it. To the extent that chemistry is the science of stuffs, the exploration of this ontological category is a necessary philosophical task. And the results of this philosophical research might also be useful for the philosophy of physics, where certain problems in the understanding of the quantum ontology or of the spacetime ontology of general relativity might, we think, be better addressed from a stuff-perspective instead of from and individual-ontological view.