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Essence and Essentialism, Misc
Edited by Nathan Wildman (Tilburg University)
About this topic
| Summary | Essentialism is, broadly speaking, the doctrine that objects have essential properties. One issue here concerns the analysis or definition of ‘essential’ - i.e., what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being an essential property? Modalists define essential properties in terms of an entity’s de re modal properties. And, while popular, the major challenges modalism faces have led many to embrace non-modalist accounts, which define essence in terms of e.g., 'real definition' or metaphysical explanation/grounding. A second issue concerns the extension of essential properties. Debates here center around various forms of essentialism, typically distinguished by the types of properties in question (e.g. origin essentialism, concerning whether an entity’s origin is essential to it, sortal essentialism, about whether an entity essentially is an instance of the sortal it is an instance of, etc.). A third issue concerns how we know essence facts. Tight connections with modal epistemology here seem obvious, but, depending upon how we answer the above analysis question, it could turn out that essence epistemology is an entirely different beast. Finally, while we can inquire about the essences of particular instances of kinds (e.g. is Tigger essentially carnivorous?), we can also ask questions about the essences of kinds themselves (e.g. are tigers essentially carnivorous?), where the former concerns individual or objectual essence, the latter, general or generic essence; the exact relation between these two types of essence is yet to be determined. |
| Key works | The place to start is Kripke 1980, which effectively re-introduced metaphysicians to essentialism; closely related is Putnam 1975. Regarding the analysis of essence, the most important piece is Fine 1994, where Fine offers his influential critique of the modalist analysis of essence. Highlighted modalist responses include Gorman 2005, Zalta 2006, Correia 2007, and Wildman 2013, though also see Correia 2012 for a few tweaks to Fine’s position and Lowe 2008 for an alternative non-modalist account. Meanwhile, concerning extension, Mackie 2006 offers a wonderful and detailed over-view of the debates here, while Paul 2006 argues against ‘shallow’ (minimalist) essentialism. Finally, on epistemology, see the above Lowe, Tahko 2018, as well as the affiliated section on Modal Epistemology. |
| Introductions | Robertson & Atkins 2013 - An excellent introduction to the Essential/Accidental Property distinction, touches upon most of the major topics concerning essence; Roca-Royes 2011 - Another excellent introduction looking at the relation between essential properties and other types of properties. |
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Related
Siblings
- Essentialism and Quantified Modal Logic (192)
- Essentialism about Species (103)
- Origins Essentialism (68)
- Scientific Essentialism (124)
- Anti-Essentialism (88)
See also
- Modal Epistemology (787 | 31)
- Fundamentality (421)
- Mereological Essentialism (45)
- Essentialism about Species (103)
- Philosophy of Gender (3,198 | 1,691)
- Feminist Metaphysics (475)
- Natural Kinds (573)
- Biological Natural Kinds (302)
- Abstract Objects (650 | 578)
- Identity (1,477 | 488)
- Material Objects (1,807 | 462)
History/traditions: Essence and Essentialism, Misc
- Locke: Essence (80)
Contents
667 found
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| 1 — 50 / 667 |
- Generalized Identity, Zero-Ground, and Necessity.Yannic Kappes - manuscriptThis paper offers a modification of Fabrice Correia's and Alexander Skiles' ("Grounding, Essence, and Identity") definition of grounding in terms of generalized identity that extends it to zero-grounding. This definition promises to improve our understanding of zero-grounding by capturing it within the framework of generalized identity and allows an essentialist theory of modality based on Correia's and Skiles' account to resist a recent challenge by Jessica Leech. The latter is achieved by combining the following two ideas: (1) Some necessities are (...)
- Conceivability, Essence, and Haecceities.Hasen Khudairi - manuscriptThis essay aims to redress the contention that epistemic possibility cannot be a guide to the principles of modal metaphysics. I introduce a novel epistemic two-dimensional truthmaker semantics. I argue that the interaction between the two-dimensional framework and the mereological parthood relation, which is super-rigid, enables epistemic possibilities and truthmakers with regard to parthood to be a guide to its metaphysical profile. I specify, further, a two-dimensional formula encoding the relation between the epistemic possibility and verification of essential properties obtaining (...)
- Transworld identity as a problem for essentialism about kinds.Kaave Lajevardi - manuscriptEssentialism about natural kinds involves talking about kinds across possible worlds. I argue that there is a non-trivial transworld identity problem here, which cannot be (dis)solved in the same way that Kripke treats the corresponding transworld identity problem for individuals. -/- I will briefly discuss some ideas for a solution. The upshot is scepticism concerning natural-kind essentialism.
- Striving (conatus).Valtteri Viljanen - manuscriptThe entry on striving (conatus) for the Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon, edited by Karolina Hübner and Justin Steinberg. This is the second (September 2022) draft; please do not quote, but comments are very welcome.
- Essential Accident and the Four-Fold Problems.Nadia Maftooni - unknown - Kheradnameh Sadra Quarterly 37.Essential accidents are among the complicated issues of the vast domain of philosophical-logical epistemology. In this paper, after a review of the meaning of the essential accident and its distinctive features from the viewpoint of philosophers such as Aristotle, Farabi, and Ibn-Sina, the writer poses the problems which are related to essential accidents. On the whole, two objections are advanced against the meaning of essential accidents and two more against its distinctive features.On of the conceptual problems is related to determining (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Value-based Essentialism: Essentialist Beliefs about Social Groups with Shared Values.April Bailey, Joshua Knobe & Newman George - forthcoming - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.Psychological essentialism has played an important role in social psychology, informing influential theories of stereotyping and prejudice as well as questions about wrongdoers’ accountability and their ability to change. In the existing literature, essentialism is often tied to beliefs in shared biology—i.e., the extent to which members of a social group are seen as having the same underlying biological features. Here we investigate the possibility of “value-based essentialism” in which people think of certain social groups in terms of an underlying (...)
- Essence, triviality and fundamentality.Ashley Coates - forthcoming - Canadian Journal of Philosophy:1-15.I defend a new account of constitutive essence on which an entity’s constitutively essential properties are its most fundamental, non-trivial necessary properties. I argue that this account accommodates the Finean counterexamples to classic modalism about essence, provides an independently plausible account of constitutive essence and does not run into clear counterexamples. I conclude that this theory provides a promising way forward for attempts to produce an adequate non-primitivist, modalist account of essence. As both triviality and fundamentality in the account are (...)
- Teleological essentialism across development.Rose David, Sara Jaramillo, Shaun Nichols & Zachary Horne - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.Do young children have a teleological conception of the essence of natural kinds? We tested this by examining how the preservation or alteration of an animal’s purpose affected children’s persistence judgments (N = 40, ages 4 - 12, Mean Age = 7.04, 61% female). We found that even when surface-level features of an animal (e.g., a bee) were preserved, if the entity’s purpose changed (e.g., the bee now spins webs), children were more likely to categorize the entity as a member (...)
- The essence of an immigrant identity: Children's pro-social responses to others based on perceived ability and desire to change.James Dunlea, Larisa Heiphetz & Redeate Wolle - forthcoming - In Kevin Patrick Tobia (ed.), Experimental Philosophy of Identity and the Self. New York, NY, USA:Much work has highlighted the degree to which children and adults view human characteristics as immutable. Less work has elucidated how people may conceptualize such immutability. Using immigration as an example domain, we examined the extent to which children’s (N=112 5- to 10-year-olds) immutability concepts reflected beliefs about others lacking the ability and/or the desire to change. Children readily agreed that immigrants could—and wanted to—change certain aspects of their identities (i.e., by adopting the norms of their new country). We also (...)
- Grounding and Properties.August Faller - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Metaphysical grounding is often presented as a relation of directed dependence analogous to causation. The relationship between causation, properties, and laws of nature is hotly debated. I ask: what is the relationship between grounding, properties, and laws of metaphysics? I begin by considering the grounding analogue of Humean quidditism. Finding it implausible, I turn to the primitive-laws account of grounding, recently defended by Jonathan Schaffer and others. I argue this view is also unsatisfactory. I then present several possible dispositionalist-like accounts (...)
- Leibniz's Causal Road to Existential Independence.Tobias Flattery - forthcoming - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis.Leibniz thinks that every created substance is causally active, and yet causally independent of every other: none can cause changes in any but itself. This is not controversial. But Leibniz also thinks that every created substance is existentially independent of every other: it is metaphysically possible for any to exist with or without any other. This is controversial. I argue that, given a mainstream reading of Leibniz’s essentialism, if one accepts the former, uncontroversial interpretation concerning causal independence, then one ought (...)
- Why 0-adic Relations Have Truth Conditions: Essence, Ground, and Non-Hylomorphic Russellian Propositions.Cody Gilmore - forthcoming - In Chris Tillman & Adam Murray (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Propositions. London: Routledge.I formulate an account, in terms of essence and ground, that explains why atomic Russellian propositions have the truth conditions they do. The key ideas are that (i) atomic propositions are just 0-adic relations, (ii) truth is just the 1-adic version of the instantiation (or, as I will say, holding) relation (Menzel 1993: 86, note 27), and (iii) atomic propositions have the truth conditions they do for basically the same reasons that partially plugged relations, like being an x and a (...)
- Formal Ontology.Jani Hakkarainen & Markku Keinänen - forthcoming - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Formal ontology as a main branch of metaphysics investigates categories of being. In the formal ontological approach to metaphysics, these ontological categories are analysed by ontological forms. This analysis, which we illustrate by some category systems, provides a tool to assess the clarity, exactness and intelligibility of different category systems or formal ontologies. We discuss critically different accounts of ontological form in the literature. Of ontological form, we propose a character- neutral relational account. In this metatheory, ontological forms of entities (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Modality and Essence in Contemporary Metaphysics.Kathrin Koslicki - forthcoming - In Yitzhak Melamed & Samuel Newlands (eds.), Modality: A Conceptual History. Oxford, UK:Essentialists hold that at least a certain range of entities can be meaningfully said to have natures, essences, or essential features independently of how these entities are described, conceptualized or otherwise placed with respect to our specifically human interests, purposes or activities. Modalists about essence, on the one hand, take the position that the essential truths are a subset of the necessary truths and the essential properties of entities are included among their necessary properties. Non-modalists about essence, on the other (...)
- Grounding and Defining Identity.Jon Erling Litland - forthcoming - Noûs.I systematically defend a novel account of the grounds for identity and distinct- ness facts: they are all uniquely zero-grounded. First, the Null Account is shown to avoid a range of problems facing other accounts: a relation satisfying the Null Account would be an excellent candidate for being the identity relation. Second, a plenitudinist view of relations suggests that there is such a relation. To flesh out this plenitudinist view I sketch a novel framework for expressing real definitions, use this (...)
- Semantic Rules, Modal Knowledge, and Analyticity.Antonella Mallozzi - forthcoming - In Dusko Prelevic & Anand Vaidya (eds.), The Epistemology of Modality and Philosophical Methodology.According to Amie Thomasson's Modal Normativism (MN), knowledge of metaphysical modality is to be explained in terms of a speaker’s mastery of semantic rules, as opposed to one’s epistemic grasp of independent modal facts. In this chapter, I outline (MN)'s account of modal knowledge (§1) and argue that more than semantic mastery is needed for knowledge of metaphysical modality. Specifically (§2), in reasoning aimed at gaining such knowledge, a competent speaker needs to further deploy essentialist principles and information. In response, (...)$42.36 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation Bookmark
- What Is Absolute Modality?Antonella Mallozzi - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.Talk of metaphysical modality as “absolute” is ambiguous, as it appears to convey multiple ideas. Metaphysical possibility is supposedly completely unrestricted or unqualified; metaphysical necessity is unconditional and exceptionless. Moreover, metaphysical modality is thought to be absolute in the sense that it’s real or genuine and the most objective modality: metaphysical possibility and necessity capture ways things could and must have really been. As we disentangle these ideas, certain talk of metaphysical modality qua “absolute” turns out to be misguided. Metaphysical (...)
- On the Reduction of Constitutive to Consequential Essence.Taylor-Grey Miller - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.Fine has introduced an important distinction between constitutive and consequential essence. The constitutive essence of an object comprises truths directly definitive of the object whereas the consequential essence comprises the class of truths following logically from the directly definitive truths (subject to certain constraints). Essence theorists then face a challenge: how shall we draw the line between the truths directly definitive of an object and those that are mere consequences of them? Fine offers an answer. We start with the object’s (...)
- Kant’s Regulative Essentialism and the Unknowability of Real Essences.Hoffer Noam - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.In his lectures on Logic and Metaphysics Kant distinguishes between logical and real essences. While the former are related to concepts and are knowable, the latter are related to things and are unknowable. In this paper, I argue that the unknowability is explained by the modal characteristic of real essences as a necessitating ground of which a priori knowledge is impossible. I also show how this claim is related to the unknowable necessity of particular laws of nature. Since laws of (...)
- Plato’s Essentialism: Reinterpreting the Theory of Forms, by Vasilis Politis.Federico M. Petrucci - forthcoming - Mind.
- La influencia del esencialismo de Kit Fine.Carlos Romero - forthcoming - In Esencia y Modalidad, de Kit Fine. Ciudad de México: UNAM.Ensayo introductorio para mi traducción del influyente artículo "Essence and Modality" de Kit Fine.
- On Explaining Necessity by the Essence of Essence.Carlos Romero - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.There has been much debate recently on the question whether essence can explain modality. Here, I examine two routes to an essentialist account of modality. The first is Hale's argument for the necessity of essence, which I will argue is — notwithstanding recent attempted defences of it — invalid by its very structure. The second is the proposal that it is essential to essential truth that it is necessary. After offering three possible versions of the view, I will argue that (...)
- Mentalizing Objects.David Rose - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy 4.We have a mentalistic view of objects. This is due to the interdependence of folk psychology and folk physics, where these are interconnected by what I call Teleological Commingling. When considering events that don’t involve agents, we naturally default to tracking intentions, goal-directed processes, despite the fact that agents aren’t involved. We have a deep-seated intentionality bias which is the result of the pervasive detection of agency cues, such as order or non-randomness. And this gives rise to the Agentive Worldview: (...)
- Dispositional essentialism and the necessity of laws: a deflationary account.Alan Sidelle - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-22.Two related claims have lately garnered currency: dispositional essentialism—the view that some or all properties, or some or all fundamental properties, are essentially dispositional; and the claim that laws of nature (or again, many or the fundamental ones) are metaphysically necessary. I have argued elsewhere (On the metaphysical contingency of laws of nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002) that the laws of nature do not have a mind-independent metaphysical necessity, but recent developments on dispositions have given these ideas a new (...)
- Two problems for Zylstra's truthmaker semantics for essence.Lisa Vogt - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.In his article ‘Making semantics for essence’ (Inquiry, 2019), Justin Zylstra proposed a truthmaker semantics for essence and used it to evaluate principles regarding the explanatory role of essence. The aim of this article is to show that Zylstra's semantics has implausible implications and thus cannot adequately capture essence.
- Is Perception Essentially Perspectival? Modality in Husserlian Phenomenology.Michael Wallner - forthcoming - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis.Husserl famously argues that it is essential to perception to present the perceived object in perspectives. Hence, there is no—and there cannot be—perception without perspectival givenness. Yet, it seems that there are counterexamples to this essentialist claim, for we seem to be able to imagine beings that do not perceive in perspectives. Recently, there have been some accounts in the literature that critically discuss those counterexamples and assess to what extent they succeed in challenging Husserl’s essentialist claim. In this paper (...)
- Humean nomic essentialism.Harjit Bhogal & Zee R. Perry - 2023 - Noûs 57 (1):81-99.Humeanism – the idea that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences – and Nomic Essentialism – the idea that properties essentially play the nomic roles that they do – are two of the most important and influential positions in the metaphysics of science. Traditionally, it has been thought that these positions were incompatible competitors. We disagree. We argue that there is an attractive version of Humeanism that captures the idea that, for example, mass essentially plays the role that (...)
- Plenitude, Coincidence, and Humility.Maegan Fairchild - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):59-77.Fairchild (2019) advertised the humility of material plenitude, arguing that despite the profligate ontology of coincident objects it entails, the best version of plenitude is one that takes no stand on a range of nearby questions about modality and coincidence. Roughly, the thought is that plenitude says only that there are coincident objects corresponding to every consistent pattern of essential and accidental properties. Plenitude says (or should say) nothing about which patterns those might be, and so should be compatible with (...)
- A Socratic Essentialist Defense of Non-Verbal Definitional Disputes.Kathrin Koslicki & Olivier Massin - 2023 - Ratio:1-15.In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility (...)
- Is Identity Essentialism a Fundamental Feature of Human Cognition?Edouard Machery, Christopher Y. Olivola, Hyundeuk Cheon, Irma T. Kurniawan, Carlos Mauro, Noel Struchiner & Harry Susianto - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (5):e13292.The present research examines whether identity essentialism, an important component of psychological essentialism, is a fundamental feature of human cognition. Across three studies (Ntotal = 1723), we report evidence that essentialist intuitions about the identity of kinds are culturally dependent, demographically variable, and easily malleable. The first study considered essentialist intuitions in 10 different countries spread across four continents. Participants were presented with two scenarios meant to elicit essentialist intuitions. Their answers suggest that essentialist intuitions vary dramatically across cultures. Furthermore, (...)
- Understanding a Thing's Nature: Comparing Afro-Relational and Western-Individualist Ontologies (Repr.).Thaddeus Metz - 2023 - In Peter Aloysius Ikhane & Isaac E. Ukpokolo (eds.), African Epistemology: Essays on Being and Knowledge. Routledge. pp. 63-78.Slightly modified reprint of an article first appearing in the journal _Synthesis Philosophica_ (2018).$31.69 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citation Bookmark
- A Modal Contextualist Account of Essentialist Claims as a Response to Kit Fine.Cristina Nencha - 2023 - Metaphysica.Kit Fine advanced a remarkable objection to the Modal Account of Essentialism. Fine’s concern is commonly thought to have put the modal account in serious jeopardy. I believe that Fine’s objection is mainly based on two intuitions. As a reaction to Fine’s argument, while many scholars have abandoned the modal account, others have attempted to save it. The main strategy in the last direction consists in adding to the modal criterion a condition that is supposed to hold universally. For different (...)
- Karl Popper and the Problem of Essentialism in Philosophy.Alexey V. Antonov - 2022 - RUDN Journal of Philosophy 26 (3):672-686.In modern philosophy, essentialism is in most cases regarded as an outdated and, in fact, incorrect philosophical trend. And one of the scientists who created such a reputation of essentialism was the famous English philosopher of Austrian origin Karl Popper. The success of his book “The Open Society and its Enemies” led to the fact that in the West essentialism began to be considered not only cognitively untenable, but also suspicious as the theoretical basis of fascism, communism and totalitarianism. In (...)
- Avicennian essentialism.Fedor Benevich - 2022 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (3):410-433.Essentialism can be defined as a metaphysical theory according to which things have essential and accidental properties. In this paper, I will address Avicennian essentialism, that is, essentialism...
- Essentialism and Spatial (Re)production.Benjamin Bross - 2022 - Architecture Philosophy 5 (2).
- Plato's Essentialism: Reinterpreting the Theory of Forms by Vasilis Politis.Travis Butler - 2022 - Review of Metaphysics 76 (1):154-156.
- Postphenomenology or Essentialism?Alexander Castleton Flores - 2022 - Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 26 (1):57-83.Inuit customs establish that food must be shared with the community. For many Inuit, income from wage-work feeds back into the subsistence economy, as money is needed to buy snowmobiles, gas, or rifles to practice harvesting activities. In the last decade, both scholars and journalists have noted that the commercialization of traditional foods through Facebook is a current controversy among Inuit. This article will discuss this issue contrasting technological essentialism and postphenomenology. While technological essentialism establishes, from a Heideggerian perspective, that (...)
- A ground-theoretical modal definition of essence.Julio De Rizzo - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):32-41.I provide a case-by-case definition of essential truths based on the notions of metaphysical necessity and ontological dependence. Relying on suggestions in the literature, I adopt a definition of the latter notion in terms of the notion of ground. The resulting account is adequate in the sense that it is not subject to Kit Fine’s famous counterexamples to the purely modal account of essence. In addition, it provides us with a novel conception of truths pertaining to the essence of objects, (...)
- Genetic Essentialism and Social Warranting.Colin M. E. Halverson - 2022 - Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 65 (3):396-414.
- New powers for Dispositionalism.Giacomo Giannini - 2022 - Synthese 200 (384):1-30.Establishing Dispositionalism as a viable theory of modality requires the successful fulfilment of two tasks: showing that all modal truths can be derived from truths about actual powers, and offering a suitable metaphysics of powers. These two tasks are intertwined: difficulties in one can affect the chances of success in the other. In this paper, I generalise an objection to Dispositionalism by Jessica Leech and argue that the theory in its present form is ill-suited to account for de re truths (...)
- Essence.Martin Glazier - 2022 - Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.This Element examines the contemporary literature on essence in connection with the traditional question whether essence lies within or without our world. Section 1 understands this question in terms of a certain distinction, the distinction between active and latent facts. Section 2 steps back to investigate the connections between essence and other philosophical concepts. Section 3 brings the results of this investigation to bear on the traditional question, sketching an argument from the premise that essentialist facts are explained by the (...)
- Review of V. Politis, Plato's Essentialism. Reinterpreting the Theory of Forms. [REVIEW]Roberto Granieri - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1):284-287.The revival of interest in the concept of essence witnessed in analytic metaphysics over the past half century has customarily been accompanied by the association of the original idea of (and of some of the main lines of thought on) essence with Aristotle. The book under review aims instead to show that Plato already ‘defends a comprehensive, coherent, and well-argued theory of essence’ (p. 11). Politis frames this claim in an overall interpretation of Plato's theory of Forms, governed by a (...)
- “Essence, modality, and the material a Priori: Scheler and Contemporary Essentialism”.Tanner Hammond - 2022 - Continental Philosophy Review 55 (3):311-334.This paper attempts to demonstrate Max Scheler’s anticipation of and continued relevance to a burgeoning trend of essence-based accounts of modality, chief among them being Kit Fine’s landmark 1994 “Essence and Modality.” I argue that Scheler’s account of the material a priori not only anticipates the picture of essence-based modality suggested by Fine, but moreover offers resources with the potential to resolve key challenges for the Finean program. In particular, Fine’s account runs into problems in explaining how formal logical necessities (...)
- Essence, Experiment, and Underdetermination in the Spinoza-Boyle Correspondence.Stephen Harrop - 2022 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 12 (2):447-484.I examine the (mediated) correspondence between Spinoza and Robert Boyle concerning the latter’s account of fluidity and his experiments on reconstitution of niter in the light of the epistemology and doctrine of method contained in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. I argue that both the Treatise and the correspondence reveal that for Spinoza, the proper method of science is not experimental, and that he accepted a powerful under-determination thesis. I argue that, in contrast to modern versions, Spinoza’s (...)
- Essentialism vs. Potentialism: Allies or Competitors?Kathrin Koslicki - 2022 - Philosophisches Jahrbuch 129 (2):325-338.Do essence-based accounts of necessity and Vetter’s potentiality-based account of possibility in fact lead to the same result, viz., a single derived notion of necessity that is interdefinable with possibility or vice versa? And does each approach independently have the ability to reach its desired goal without having to rely on the primitive notion utilized by the other? In this essay, I investigate these questions and Vetter’s responses to them. Contrary to the “separatist” position defended by Vetter, I argue that (...)
- Essentialist Non-Reductivism.Taylor-Grey Edward Miller - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.According to many contemporary metaphysicians, we ought to theorize in terms of grounding because of its promise to explicate the idea of reality having a layered structure. However, a tension emerges when one combines the layered structure view with the view that higher-level facts are not reducible to lower-level facts. This tension emerges from two problems. The first problem arises from the fact that grounding explanations entail true universal generalizations. In order to satisfy this constraint, we will face serious pressure (...)
- Augustine’s Master Argument for the Incorporeality of the Mind.Tamer Nawar - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):422-440.In De Trinitate 10, Augustine offers an argument that seemingly proceeds from certain premises about self-knowledge to the conclusion that the mind is incorporeal. Although the argument has sometimes been compared to later Cartesian arguments, it has received relatively little philosophical attention. In this paper, I offer a detailed analysis and original interpretation of Augustine's argument and argue that it is not vulnerable to some of the main objections which have been raised against it. I go on to argue that (...)
- Aristotelian essentialism in David Lewis's theory.Cristina Nencha - 2022 - Philosophical Inquiries 10 (2):9-37.David Lewis is usually thought to reject what Quine called “Aristotelian essentialism”. The starting point of this paper is to define and explain Aristotelian essentialism and locate it in the context of the criticism that Quine made of quantified modal logic. Indeed, according to Quine, Aristotelian essentialism would be one of the consequences of accepting quantified modal logic. After having explained Lewis’s stance in the Quinean debate against quantified modal logic, this paper will deal with the question as to whether (...)
- Psychological Essentialism and the Structure of Concepts.Eleonore Neufeld - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (5):e12823.Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors. Throughout the past several decades, psychological essentialism has emerged as an extremely active area of research in cognitive science. More recently, it has also attracted attention from philosophers, who put the empirical results to use in many different philosophical areas, ranging from philosophy of mind and cognitive science to social (...)
- A Puzzle for Social Essences.Michael J. Raven - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (1):128-148.The social world contains institutions, groups, objects, and more. This essay explores a puzzle about the essences of social items. There is widespread consensus against social essences because of problematic presuppositions often made about them. But it is argued that essence can be freed from these presuppositions and their problems. Even so, a puzzle still arises. In a Platonic spirit, essences in general seem detached from the world. In an Aristotelian spirit, social essences in particular seem embedded in the world. (...)
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