The familiar distinction between nouns, adjectives and verbs provides an approximate guide to the philosophical concepts of substance, mode and attribute.
A third connection concerns the metaphysics of substance, mode and identity.
Ruth Mattern in her article "Moral Science and the Concept of a Person in Locke" (1980), Antonia LaLordo in "Person, Substance, Mode and the Moral Man in Locke's Philosophy" (2010) and Galen Strawson in Locke on Personal Identity have developed the evidence for mode interpretations.
Hume's attacks on notions of substance, mode, essence, force, power, self, and of course — God, all rely on his rhetorically powerful ability to ask to what impression such notions can be traced (e.g., Treatise 1.1.6; 1.2.5.28; 1.4.14, and 1.4.5.3 4; on idea of God, see EHU 2.6).
Manufacturers have made great progress in the design of compression hose and bandages; however, to assess this treatment using the evidence-based medical methods stipulated by learned societies, great rigour is demanded in clinical trials, and the active substances, mode of action and requisite "dosages" must be precisely defined.
Most notably, if ideas are abstract, logical entities, then they are even more difficult to reconcile with Malebranche's substance-mode ontology.
Curley has argued that Spinoza retains the conception of the substance-mode distinction as a distinction between independent and dependent being, but rejects the view that the substance-mode distinction correlates to the distinction between a subject of predication and its predicate.
In his favour, he never strayed from the Cartesian metaphysics, i.e., its substance dualism of mind and matter, substance-mode ontology, mind-body union and interaction, and the view that extension is the essence of matter and thought the essence of mind; and he remained loyal to the Cartesian physics against that of the atomists.
Malebranche, it would appear, is forced to abandon his substance-mode ontology: 'I believe that intelligible extension is neither a substance nor a modification of substance, notwithstanding the axiom of the Philosophers [that everything is a either a substance or a mode]' (OC 6 245).
This is evident in a number of texts; for instance, in response to his Lockean interlocutor, Leibniz writes in the New Essays: "This division of the objects of our thoughts into substances, modes, and relations is pretty much to my liking.
To explain this proposition, Gueroult draws a distinction between "modes of substance" and "modes of attributes".
