Repristinating Substance-Metaphysics Descombes undertakes this philosophy of action by returning to metaphysics. He argues that our ordinary language of subjectivity shows that the subject is not a question of self-consciousness (grammatically, not first-person language) but a question of agency (third-person language): “Who is it who did that?” we ask.[32] This centrality of agency leads him to argue that ethics, that is, “practical philosophy does not require a thinking of the (philosophical) subject” of consciousness “but a thinking of the suppositum.”[33] In his 2004 book, Le Complément de Sujet, he is even clearer about his Aristotelian stripes. He asks if, among the various usages of “subject” by philosophy, there might be one that is intelligible and necessary: I answer that there is one usage that fulfills this condition: namely, the subject as complement of the agent. Such a subject must have the traits needed to play the role of an agent: it must not only be identifiable as an individual but also present in the world as a causal power. This subject has therefore all the traits of a substance or, to use the technical and traditional term, of a suppositum. In other words, the subject that must be discovered by us is more Aristotelian than Cartesian.[34]

The Fallout from the 20th Century Quarrel Over the Subject | Church Life Journal | University of Notre Dame

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