Sostanze, corpi e menti. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz

In early-modern times, the questions that we retrospectively associate with 'substance' involves a multifaceted philosophical problematic, in which the keywords 'substance' and 'thing' (res) cannot be separated from 'body', 'spirit', 'mind' and 'soul'. They are encircled by a set of terms straddling between metaphysics and the doctrine of mind: body and essence, person and identity, reality and existence, and above all matter and thought, considered, as in the Platonic tradition, a fundamental opposition. This complex and unstable vocabulary is distributed over a family of problems pertaining to two main areas: what exists and what ensures the stability and effectiveness of this existence, on the one hand; on the other hand, the character of the sentient and thinking individual, and the corporeal or incorporeal nature of the subject of thought. Early-modern debates, starting from Descartes, imply a closer overlap between these two problems than in the classic conception of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions.