Reshaping the Concept of Substance: The Renegade Ockham

The importance attributed to the concept of substance in the philosophy of the Latin Middle Ages may sometimes be exaggerated in retrospect. Sub-stance is of crucial importance in the philosophies of Spinoza and John Locke, for instance, much later in history. Nevertheless, the importance given to substance in some philosophical movements is part of the medie-val heritage up to our days. This, on the other hand, is a reaction to the ne-glect of the concept of substance in the Aristotelian sense within the tradi-tion of modern natural sciences. The modern sciences as we know them developed out of the medieval learning. But the novelty of this type of sci-ence consisted in the definite refusal to answer questions about the essence of anything. The propagators of the new science tried to answer questions like how things influence one another and act upon another. Nobody knows, for instance, what gravity is, but it is well known and generally ac-cepted that two bodies attract or, to say it less metaphorically, move to-wards one another directly proportionally to the product of their masse