Digby on Accidents

In his Two Treatises, Digby rejects real accidents, or accidents conceived as actual beings in themselves over and above the substances whose accidents they are. At the same time, however, he also claims that there is a real ‘divisibility’ between a substance and its quantity. According to some commentators, this suggests that quantity for Digby is a real accident after all. In this paper I argue that it is not. The divisibility between substance and quantity Digby accepts is too weak to turn quantity into what Digby calls an actual being in itself. Once we have a better understanding of what Digby means when he denies that accidents are actual beings in themselves, some of the more problematic sides of the criticism he levels against his Aristotelian predecessors will also become apparent. When Digby criticizes accidents as actual beings in themselves, he often accuses the scholastic Aristotelians of treating locations as such. But once we take a closer look at the scholastic theory he criticizes in this connection, we see that this theory does not do that.