Priority and substance in Aristotle’s metaphysics

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to examine Aristotle’s notions of priority in orderto determine which sort of priority he ascribes to substances. I try to show that wecannot accept the traditional idea that a substance’s priority must be understoodas existential independence. Aristotle rather ascribes to substances a priority interms of completion, as he ascribes to substances-of-something some specific sortof causal-explanatory priority. Besides that, Aristotle argues, against Platonism,that these two sorts of priority (completion priority and causal-explanatory priority)must be kept apart from each other in any successful ontology.