Accidental Beings in Aristotle’s Ontology

Aristotle, as is well known, proposes an ontology of substances and accidents. Substances, such as a man or a horse, are the basic, independent, entities in this ontology; accidents are the dependent entities that inhere in the substances. Accidents are usually thought of as the properties of substances, and on the whole this is a reasonably accurate way to think about them. A horse, for example, is a substance, and pallor, perhaps, is a property (an “accident”) of that horse. But that is not the end of Aristotle’s story. For in addition to the substance and the property, he thinks that there is something else—an accidental being, I will call it—that is intermediate between the substance and the property. In the case of our example, Aristotle would use the expression “the pale horse,” or sometimes, without specifying which substance enters into the compound, simply “the pale [thing]” to pick out this intermediate entity.