Formal and Proper: Substantial Form and Essential Accidents in Thomas Aquinas

Shields, Daniel

doi:10.5840/acpq2025416304

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

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published on April 18, 2025

Daniel Shields

https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq2025416304

Formal and Proper
Substantial Form and Essential Accidents in Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas, following Aristotle, distinguishes between substances and their accidents: that is, between things and their attributes. He also distinguishes between proper accidents (also known as properties in Scholastic terminology) and accidental accidents, that is, between accidents that belong to a substance in virtue of what it is, and accidents that belong to it due to extrinsic factors. Aquinas says that a thing’s proper accidents are caused by the thing’s own essential principles. John Wippel interprets Aquinas as holding that a substance efficiently causes its own proper accidents. I argue that Aquinas is more plausibly read as holding that a substance formally causes its own proper accidents. Formal causality extends to more than just the informing of matter. Formal causality is a principle of determination: being a certain substance involves the determination of having certain proper accidents.

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