Jump to content

Talk:Accident (philosophy)

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Comments

[edit]

The definition used here does not seem to exactly match the usage in the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation. Could someone with expertise expand the article to include this usage, or to clarify the situation? See Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation, and Eucharist.

I'm guessing that accident has a slightly different meaning in Aristotelian substance theory than it does in more modern ideas about Essence, but I don't really know and none of those pages really address the issue.--Srleffler 01:55, 4 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well, Aristotle's understanding of substance, essence, and accident was certainly different from the Scholastics, and he would almost certainly have found the developed theological view of transsubstantiation to be unintelligible. But could you clarify a bit more how you think that the definition of accident here doesn't square with the definition used in discussions of transsubstantiation? (My understanding of the view was that accidents are still regarded as non-essential properties; and the view that the bread becomes the Body of Christ involves the claim that all the sensible properties of the bread are -- therefore -- neither part of the essence of the bread, nor essentially incompatible with the essence of Christ's body. If this is a misunderstanding, I apologize, and look forward to being corrected.)
Radgeek 01:23, 6 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a graduate student in philosophy. The contemporary usage of accident is derived from modal logic, as are most terms in modern philosophy. The modern philosophical usage is going to be therefore different then content based theories of essence, such as Kripke and such as theological views. I can expand the article to explain this distinction. Would you like me to?

EDIT: I have done so, please comment

This is only true for the anglo-saxon tradition of analytic philosophy which 1. isn't all of modern philosophy and 2. has a much lower impact on other sciences and the humanities in comparison to the continental tradition. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:16B8:686C:BB00:28BB:42EE:3C36:A73E (talk) 08:54, 7 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]


If I may suggest, the following sentence could use a minor clarification: "Accident, sumbebekos as used in philosophy, is an attribute which may or may not belong to a subject, without affecting its essence." It appeared to me (a relative novice in the field doing reading on background concepts) that the word "sumbebekos" was vandalism as I had not seen it used before; given that this page in fact refers to sumbebekos as a synonym for the philosophical concept of Accident, would it be advisable to bold the word and properly frame it as a secondary referent: "Accident, or sumbebekos as used in philosophy, is an attribute which may or may not belong to a subject, without affecting its essence." Would this be a proper representation of the intent of the word sumbebekos used here? --128.193.145.92 (talk) 19:56, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed there is a separate article for the above. Currently it is a stub. To me it seems that the article could better redirect to here, and anything worthwhile in that stub could be incorporated? What do others think?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:55, 4 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]