Contra Pruss on Matter (Part 2)
(This is the second of three blog posts.) See here for Part 1 . The biggest issue with Pruss’ jettisoning matter is that he throws himself back into the situation of the Presocratics when it comes to substantial change. Pruss wrongly thinks that the issue that the persisting matter is meant to explain is how a corpse looks like the living body, but this isn’t really what is at stake. Rather what is at stake is the very possibility of the generation and destruction of substances. Given the impossibility (in the natural order at least) of something’s coming from nothing, it is hard to see how substantial change is ever possible once we deny the existence of some matter that persists through the loss of one form and acquisition of another. If the one substance passes away and then in the next moment another substance comes to exist in the same place, it is hard to see how this is a change rather than one thing’s annihilation and another’s creation ex nihilo . First Master
