This lecture, as the title suggests, is about particulars. And the main question is: Is there something more to a thing than its properties? The main text is E.B. Allaire’s essay “Bare Particulars” out of Loux’s book Universals and Particulars. One of the first problems or questions Dallas takes up is the epistemological one: whether you can see relations between things (e.g. spacial relations like next to) without first seeing the things.
Around 7:00 he takes up the ontological problem: whether the relations between things could constitute the identities of and difference between things. Allaire’s main argument is that relationships between things obtain only because these things are certain kinds of things.
Beginning at 20:00 a student, who is resisting Allaire’s argument, spars with Dallas about the issue, the student claiming that he sees spacial relations before or simultaneous to seeing the things which are spacially related.
Midway through the lecture Dallas moves on to substance, a big philosophical issue. He says in his introduction that the fuss about material substance and mental substance is not about the material or the mental but about the status of particularity. And then he goes on to speak (47:45) of an even stronger argument for the existence of particulars which is “the union of qualities in any one object taken by itself.” This is where he will hold up a white sheet a paper and talk about how the whiteness and the squareness combine. With this argument he is getting into the idea of substance (it is Leibnitz’s idea of substance). He also shares that, in his view, this Aristotle’s notion of primary substance.
Only at the very end 63:00 does he introduce the difference between talking about particulars only and talking about substance which is change or properties replacing one another in the same thing. And this brings up potentiality. Back to his example of white paper he points out that the paper has the potential of being brown if left in the sun. But it isn’t brown now. The discussion of this will mainly continue in the next lecture when he speaks of dispositions.
By the way, this is an important issue for theology too because there are all sorts of things in theology which change their properties and yet stay the same thing (e.g. human beings in the process of being saved).