RT Article
T1 Formal and Proper: Substantial Form and Essential Accidents in Thomas Aquinas
JF American catholic philosophical quarterly
VO 99
IS 1
SP 1
OP 18
A1 Shields, Daniel
LA English
YR 2025
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1925446646
AB Aquinas, following Aristotle, distinguishes between substances and their accidents: that is, between things and their attributes. He also distinguishes between proper accidents (also known as properties in Scholastic terminology) and accidental accidents, that is, between accidents that belong to a substance in virtue of what it is, and accidents that belong to it due to extrinsic factors. Aquinas says that a thing's proper accidents are caused by the thing's own essential principles. John Wippel interprets Aquinas as holding that a substance efficiently causes its own proper accidents. I argue that Aquinas is more plausibly read as holding that a substance formally causes its own proper accidents. Formal causality extends to more than just the informing of matter. Formal causality is a principle of determination: being a certain substance involves the determination of having certain proper accidents.
DO 10.5840/acpq2025416304