 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Accident" philosophy – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(October 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Anaccident (Greekσυμβεβηκός), inmetaphysics andphilosophy, is a property that the entity or substance hascontingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. An accident does not affect itsessence, according to many philosophers.[1] It does not mean an "accident" as used in common speech, a chance incident, normally harmful. Examples of accidents are color, taste, movement, and stagnation.[2] Accident is contrasted with essence: a designation for the property or set of properties that make an entity orsubstance what it fundamentally is, and which it has bynecessity, and without which it loses itsidentity.
Aristotle made a distinction between theessential and accidentalproperties of a thing.Thomas Aquinas and otherCatholic theologians have employed the Aristotelian concepts of substance and accident in articulating thetheology of theEucharist, particularly thetransubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood.
Inmodern philosophy, an accident (or accidental property) is the union of two concepts: property andcontingency.Non-essentialism argues that every property is an accident. Modalnecessitarianism argues that all properties are essential and no property is an accident.
Aristotle made a distinction between theessential and accidentalproperties of a thing. For example, a chair can be made of wood or metal, but this is accidental to its being a chair: that is, it is still a chair regardless of the material from which it is made.[3] To put this in technical terms, an accident is a property which has no necessary connection to theessence of the thing being described.[4][5][6]
To take another example, all bachelors are unmarried: this is the necessary or essential property of what it means to be a bachelor. A particular bachelor may have brown hair, but this would be a property particular to that individual, and with respect to his bachelorhood it would be an accidental property. And this distinction is independent of experimental verification: even if for some reason all the unmarried men with non-brown hair were killed, and every single existent bachelor had brown hair, the property of having brown hair would still be accidental since it would still be logically possible for a bachelor to have hair of another color.
The nine kinds of accidents, according to Aristotle, are quantity, quality, relation, habitus, time, location, situation (or position), action, and passion ("being acted on"). Together with "substance", these nine kinds of accidents constitute the ten fundamentalcategories of Aristotle'sontology.[7]
Catholic theologians such asThomas Aquinas have employed the Aristotelian concepts of substance and accident in articulating thetheology of theEucharist, particularly thetransubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood. According to this tradition, the accidents (orspecies) of the appearance of bread and wine do not change, but the substance changes from bread and wine to theBody and Blood of Christ.
In modernphilosophy, an accident (or accidental property) is the union of two concepts:property andcontingency. In relation to the first, an accidental property (Greeksymbebekos)[8] is at its most basic level aproperty. The color "yellow", "high value", "Atomic Number 79" are all properties, and are therefore candidates for being accidental. On the other hand, "gold", "platinum", and "electrum" are not properties, and are therefore not classified as accidents.
There are two opposed philosophical positions that also impact the meaning of this term:
| Overview | |||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ideas and interests |
| ||||||||||||||||||
| Works |
| ||||||||||||||||||
| Related topics | |||||||||||||||||||
Authority control databases: National |
|---|
