A Comparasion Between The Thoery Of Essence Of Aristotle And Thomas Aquinas

Among the whole history of western philosophy, there are three categories which are extremely important, namely being, substance and essence. Plenty of scholars have being always researched for the first two categories: being and substance, and the achievements are remarkable. But the category of essence is always forgotten by most people from the beginning. In view of this fact, the primary mission of this article is to elaborate the theory of essence of two famous philosophers——Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Both of them are representatives in western philosophy. Although most times Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle's thoughts, at the same time and on many questions he also has his own opinion. This article will try to demonstrate the differences between the theory of essence of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle.This article can be divided into four parts. The first part simply explain the notion of essence. The second part discuss thoughts of essence of Aristotle. Third introduce theory of essence of Thomas Aquinas. The fourth compare one kind of theory of essence with the other, by which we can prove that Thomas protrudes the supreme state of being through elaborating the relationship between being and essence, which is obviously different from Aristotle's thoughts. In Aristotle's metaphysics even form is more important than being. Moreover, because Aristotle does not distinguish the essence of simple substance from the essence of composite substance as Thomas Aquinas has done, he removes matter from all kinds of substances. According to Thomas Aquinas, the essence of simple substance does not contain matter, but the essence of composite substance must contain matter. And among the statements of this problem, Aristotle has confused universe with individual, the reason of which is because he does not explicitly realize the discrimination between the two way of philosophical statements: logics and metaphysics as Thomas has done.