Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

At the root of all these difficulties is a fundamental confusion.5 The accidentalist account is plausible because we do in fact use accidents to tell things apart. We tell Groucho apart from Harpo by noticing that he is, for example, the one with the cigar, not the one with the blond wig. But that doesn’t mean that accidents really account for the distinctness between things. How could they, if accidents depend on those very things? This would be like saying that the Marx Brothers movies are funny because people laugh at them. It’s true that these two things go together: funny movies do provoke laughter, and we can tell that a movie is funny from the fact that people laugh at it. But it’s because the movies are funny that people laugh, not the other way around. In the same way, it may be true that we only find particular accidents, and unique collections of accidents, in individual substances. This is why we can use accidents to tell substances apart. But that is a matter of epistemology, not metaphysics. Or to put it another way, accidents show us that things are individual, but they don’t explain why things are individual.