Essence and Essentialism
Assistant editor: Esther Rosario (Dartmouth College, University of Alberta)
About this topic
Summary | Essentialists hold that at least a certain range of entities can be meaningfully said to have essences or natures independently of how these entities figure in our specifically human activities (e.g., linguistic, mental, social, conventional, explanatory, inferential or other practices). Anti-essentialists of various stripes (e.g., anti-realists, social constructivists, conventionalists, conferralists, pragmatists, etc.) deny that entities have essences in this sense. Commonly (at least in non-historical contexts) the essence/accident distinction is drawn in terms of a distinction between the essential and accidental properties of an entity; but the claim that essences should be thought of as properties or collections thereof is by no means uncontroversial. Following Aristotle, the essence/accident distinction is often characterized in terms of different types of changes that an entity could or could not survive, revealing simultaneously a connection between the notions of essence and substance: while entities can persist through non-substantial changes, i.e., changes with respect to their accidents, no entity can persist through a substantial change, i.e., a change with respect to its essence; a substantial change therefore is one in which an entity comes into or goes out of existence. Other (often related) characterizations of the essence/accident distinction also exist in the literature: for example, essences are linked with the classification of entities into kinds (especially natural kinds), persistence conditions, modal profiles, individuation, unity, as well as explanation and the formulation of general laws. Essences and conceptions of essence come in many different flavors: for example, we can distinguish between individual and kind essences; historical (genealogical, origin) essences and non-historical essences; as well as between intrinsic vs. relational/extrinsic essences. Modalists conceive of essences in modal terms, while non-modalists take facts about essences as basic and hold that necessity in some way “flows” from essence. While the exact nature of this alleged connection between non-modal essence and necessity still remains to be worked out, candidate proposals include appeals to logical consequence, metaphysical explanation (e.g., as associated with grounding or ontological dependence) or causation (e.g., formal causation). |
Key works | Essences have been a central philosophical concern throughout the history of Western philosophy, going back at least to the Socratic practice of asking “What is F?” questions. In modern times, so-called “Aristotelian essentialism” was famously subjected to criticism by W.V.O. Quine (e.g., in Turquette 1955), but rehabilitated, e.g., by Ruth Barcan Marcus (e.g., in Marcus 1971) and Saul Kripke (e.g., in Kripke 1980). The recent revival of Aristotelian essentialism in metaphysics can mostly be traced to Kit Fine’s influential defense of a non-modal conception of essence (e.g., in Fine 1994, Fine 1995, Fine 1994, Fine 1995, Fine 2000). Modal accounts of essence can be found, for example, in Forbes 1985, Lewis 1986, Mackie 2006, Plantinga 1974. |
Introductions | Robertson & Atkins 2013, Roca-Royes 2011, Roca-Royes 2011 |
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Related categories
Subcategories:
See also:
Essentialism about Species* (100)
Origins Essentialism (67)
Scientific Essentialism (124)
Anti-Essentialism (84)
- Aristotle: Essence (74)
- Fundamentality (381)
- Grounding (440)
- Modality (3,890 | 270)
- The Necessity of Identity (57)
- Contingent Identity (75)
- Natural Kinds (563)
- Substance (691)
- Intrinsic and Extrinsic Properties (87)
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General Editors:
David Bourget (Western Ontario) David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) Area Editors: David Bourget Gwen Bradford Berit Brogaard Margaret Cameron David Chalmers James Chase Rafael De Clercq Ezio Di Nucci Barry Hallen Hans Halvorson Jonathan Ichikawa Michelle Kosch Øystein Linnebo JeeLoo Liu Paul Livingston Brandon Look Manolo Martínez Matthew McGrath Michiru Nagatsu Susana Nuccetelli Giuseppe Primiero Jack Alan Reynolds Darrell P. Rowbottom Aleksandra Samonek Constantine Sandis Howard Sankey Jonathan Schaffer Thomas Senor Robin Smith Daniel Star Jussi Suikkanen Lynne Tirrell Aness Kim Webster Other editors Contact us Learn more about PhilPapers |