Categories and Family resemblance

As this kind of thinking became more predominant, a different picture emerged of the fundamental nature of reality. For one thing, the borders between the different substances began to blur. Once we see an organism as a system, it becomes natural to see that organism as also part of a much larger system, which in turn is part of a still larger system, and so on. The natural goal implied by this perspective is to see the universe as one big system run by a single set of fundamental laws. This goal seemed tantalizingly close after the discoveries of Newton. Among his many other accomplishments, he explained the previously inexplicable behavior of the planets in the night sky, using laws that could also account for the behavior of moving objects on earth. The people who did work inspired by Newton began to see themselves as being importantly different from traditional philosophers, even though they continued to call themselves “Natural philosophers” and did not adopt the name “scientist” until the 19th century. Their work seemed to require a metaphysics that was importantly different from both Plato and Aristotle.

Eventually , Aristotle’s idea that there are multiple substances was abandoned. There was a debate over whether there was only one substance (matter) or two (matter and mind), but that debate was largely ignored in the context of what we would now call scientific research. Science came to be seen as looking for the laws that govern the behavior of all matter. The items that Aristotle called substances were now described as different patterns…