At the end of book VII in Chapter 17, after he's shown us how all the previous answers of "what is thinghood" were inadequate, I think he concludes that (a?) thinghood is the source of an independent thing that maintains itself.
I still feel kind of empty about this though, so here's my question (unless you'd rather correct what I just wrote):
Philosophically, what is the significance of this, and can we do anything with it, other than not get into the kind of philosophical missteps that the are being shown in the previous chapters of Book VII?
One reason why this is philosophically significant is because when we ask questions like "Why do these bricks and stones make a house?" or "Why does flesh and bones make a human being?," we are looking for what is responsible for making it that way and our answers hint to the essence of a thing (1041a20-29). For example, Aristotle says the answer to the first question about the house is "because what it is to be a house belongs to them" (1041b7-ish). Since then the essence of a house is what causes bricks and stones to join together to make a house, then we can distinguish thinghood from an element in the material and form. Rather, it is the cause of the elements that combine to make a house.
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(Quick answer--I can come back with textual stuff later) I was walking around outside thinking about all of this, wondering the exact same thing. I looked at a bush and thought, "Why do I need to think about what the thinghood of a bush is? It is pretty apparent that the bush is there, it is, and what more do I need to know about it?" I then saw some other humans walking around, and it struck me: isn't it so remarkable the way all of these bipedal things are just moving themselves around, doing their own things--sometimes participating in a group, as with one mind, and other times treating themselves as their own personal, isolated cosmos? I think Aristotle asked about "thinghood" for Mackenzie's reasons above, but more explicitly because it is the only way to start talking about that strange phenomenon that is "I" and "others." Once we start talking about what humans are beneath just the matter, we can start to see how the bush is something similar.
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