Two arguments are offered here for postulating individual essences of concrete individuals on top of their sortal essences. One is the explanatory gap argument, the other draws on the analogy with the individual essences of events presupposed in single causal explanations. These arguments support qualitative individual essences with explanatory goals as opposed to hybrid impure relational essences accounting for origin and numerical identity. It is highlighted why origin properties as parts of impure (...) relational essences do not yield genuine de re constructions. The distinction between the two types of individual essences is traced back to the ambiguity of the very notion of individuation. (shrink)

According to Essentialism, an object’s properties divide into those that are essential and those that are accidental. While being human is commonly thought to be essential to Socrates, being a philosopher plausibly is not. We can motivate the distinction by appealing—as we just did—to examples. However, it is not obvious how best to characterize the notion of essential property, nor is it easy to give conclusive arguments for the essentiality of a given property. In this paper, I elaborate on these (...) issues and explore the way in which essential properties behave in relation to other related properties, like sufficient-for-existence properties and individual essences. (shrink)

The book's aim is to give a working representation of what metaphysics is today. The historical contributions reveal the roots of metaphysical themes and how today's methods are linked to their Aristotelian and Leibnizian past. The volume also touches on the relationships between ontological and linguistic analysis, the questions of realism and ontological commitment, the nature of abstract objects, the existential meaning of particular quantification, the primitiveness of identity, the question of epistemic versus ontological vagueness, the necessity of origin, the (...) nature of natural necessity, the possibility of intermittent existence, the notion of a temporal part and its place in an account of persistence, the question of identity and change across time and possible worlds, and many more. Readership: A toolbox for any researcher in metaphysics and an essential source for any PhD student with ontological interests. (shrink)

A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types of features that people typically consider when making such judgments, to date, existing work has not explored how these judgments may be shaped by normative considerations. The present studies demonstrate that normative beliefs (...) do appear to play an important role in people's beliefs about persistence. Specifically, people are more likely to judge that the identity of a given entity remains the same when its features improve than when its features deteriorate. Study 1 provides a basic demonstration of this effect. Study 2 shows that this effect is moderated by individual differences in normative beliefs. Study 3 examines the underlying mechanism, which is the belief that, in general, various entities are essentially good. Study 4 directly manipulates beliefs about essence to show that the positivity bias regarding essences is causally responsible for the effect. (shrink)

In this paper I show that a novel ontic reading of explanation, intending to capture the de re essential features of individuals, can support the qualitative view of individual essences. It is argued further that the putative harmful consequences of the Leibniz Principle and its converse for the qualitative view can be avoided, provided that individual essences are not construed in the style of the naïve bundle theory with set-theoretical identity- conditions. Adopting either the more sophisticated (...) two-tier BT or, alternatively, the neo-Aristotelian position of taking essences as natures in the Aristotelian sense, can help to evade these main charges against the qualitative view. The functional parallels with the alternative haecceitistic view of individuation and individual essence will also be considered. (shrink)

Two arguments are offered here for postulating individual essences of concrete individuals on top of their sortal essences. One is the explanatory gap argument, the other draws on the analogy with the individual essences of events presupposed in single causal explanations. These arguments support qualitative individual essences with explanatory goals as opposed to hybrid impure relational essences accounting for origin and numerical identity. It is highlighted why origin properties as parts of impure (...) relational essences do not yield genuine de re constructions. The distinction between the two types of individual essences is traced back to the ambiguity of the very notion of individuation. (shrink)

This book supports a version of the trope-bundle view of individual substances matching also with a coherent account of change, individuation and individual essences. In particular, it is argued that qualitative individuation and qualitative individual essences can be tackled within the frames of a trope account. The adoption of a trope BT together with the individuation of tropes via the bearer substance might create the feeling of circularity since tropes and substances seem mutually to individuate (...) each other. The novel solution to the problem developed here consists in showing that the individuation of concrete individual substances is independent, in crucial respects, from the fact that they are construed as bundles of tropes. Apart from metaphysician colleagues, the book is recommended for advanced students in analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

In “Can the New Tenseless Theory of Time be Saved by Individual Essences?” Smith objects to the co-reporting theory on the groundsthat, since it grants that every time “now” is tokened it expresses a unique individual essence of that time which can be apprehended only at that time, the co-reporting theory is consistent with an A-theory of time that holds that each moment of time acquires its own particular property of presentness. I argue that Smith’s conclusion does (...) not follow, since moments of time have world-indexed properties which, though distinct from the individual essences ascribed to them by the use of “now,” are expressible by the use ofdate-expressions. (shrink)

I will begin by conceding that some of Beer’s arguments are sound (mostly on pages before the last page), and observe that Beer’s theory that “now” ascribes an individual essence to a time on each occasion of its tokening is a novel theory that seems fruitful and is worthy of being pursued and of being developed to deal with the criticisms in the following points.

Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation is a sustained defense of empiricism—or, more generally, conventionalism—against recent attacks by realists. Sidelle focuses his attention on necessity a posteriori, a kind of necessity which contemporary realists have taken to support realism over empiricism. Turning the tables against the realists, Sidelle argues that if there are in fact truths necessary a posteriori, it is not realism, but rather empiricism which provides the best explanation for them.

Aristotle's claim in Metaphysics Z.6 that "each substance is the same as its essence" has long puzzled commentators. For it seems to conflict with two other Aristotelian theses: (1) primary substances are individuals (e.g., Socrates and Callias), and (2) essences are universals (e.g., Man and Horse). Three traditional solutions to this difficulty are considered and rejected. Instead, to make the Z.6 equation consistent with (1) and (2), I propose that it be interpreted to be making something other than a (...) straightforward identity claim. Callias is the same as his essence in the sense that to be identical to Callias is to be the same man as Callias (where Man is the essence of Callias). In general, x is identical to y if, and only if, x and y are the same E (where E specifies the "what it is to be" for x, i.e., the essence of x). So each of Socrates and Callias is the same as his essence, and Man is that essence, but Socrates and Callias are not identical, for they are not the same man. (shrink)

이 글은 스피노자의 개체화 이론이 어떻게 스피노자 철학의 전체 체계와 모순 없이 조 화될 수 있는지를 들뢰즈의 스피노자론을 통해서 해명하는 것을 그 목적으로 한다. 왜냐하 면 스피노자의 개체화 이론은 표면적으로 모순들을 가지고 있는 것처럼 보이기 때문이다. 그것은 양태의 본질의 실존과 양태의 실존 사이의 구분에 관한 문제이다. 국내의 몇몇 스 피노자 연구자들은 양태의 본질의 실존과 양태의 실존 사이의 구별은 스피노자를 오해한 것이라고 비판한다. 그들이 보기에 양태의 본질의 실존과 양태의 실존을 구분하는 것은 스 피노자의 철학을 플라톤주의화하는 것이기 때문이다. 즉 양태의 본질의 실존을 (...) 양태의 실 존 외부에 두는 것은 플라톤이 그러했던 것처럼 세계를 두 세계로 나누는 것을 의미하기 때문이다. 그러나 양태의 본질의 실존과 양태의 실존의 구분은 스피노자가 명시적이지는 않지만 많은 곳에서 드러내고 있는 구분이다. 그리고 이 구분과 함께 내재성은 유지될 수 있다. 왜냐하면 양태의 본질과 실존의 구분은 실재적 구분이 아니기 때문이다. 실존 양태 는 더 이상 실체 또는 속성 안에 담겨만 있지는 않다. 이 담겨만 있지 않다는 스피노자의 표현이 중요하다. 즉 그 구분은 실체적이 아니라 양태적 구분이라는 것이다. 이를 통해 스 피노자의 철학은 내재성이 모순 없이 유지될 수 있다. 들뢰즈는 이것을 강도량과 외연량의 구분을 통해서 설명해낸다. 스피노자의 개체화 이론의 두 계열 즉 합성과 본질은 강도량과 외연량의 구분을 통해서 화해하게 된다. (shrink)

Hajime Tanabe (1885-1962), the Kyoto- School philosopher of modern Japan, attempts to interpret Aristotle's ontology as being involved in the logic of self-identical being without self-negative conversion in action from his own dialectical perspective. For Tanabe, the eternal essence or Form is to be mediated by the dynamic character of matter, i.e., the temporality pertinent to the changing movement. For Aristotle, however, the essence or pure activity as the principle of being is devoid of such a dynamic mediation, but is (...) rather regarded as the past being, i.e., what it should be originally and eternally. In other words, for Aristotle, evil and matter are the lacks of goodness and the eternal Form that are identical with the essence of the individual substance. Evil is to be self-negatively mediated to goodness in free action through conversion in Tanabe's perspective. Movement pertaining to matter is not simply an incompletion of pure activity, but is rather self-negatively converted into the activity as the transcendent principle of the dialectical unification of time and eternity, matter and Form, evil and Goodness. The individual existence has freedom to unify the self-contradistinctive opposed moments, i.e., subjective action and objective being in a way of mutually negating conversion. The difference between Tanabe and Aristotle lies in that for Tanabe practice is relevant to the future, whereas for Aristotle contemplation is concerned with eternity as invariable and imperishable being since the past. While Aristotle's logic is confined to the self-identity of being in contemplation, Tanabe's logic is structured by the triadic elements of individuality, species as the relative universal, and genus as the absolute universal in terms of the negative conversion in action. (shrink)

Hajime Tanabe (1885-1962), the Kyoto- School philosopher of modern Japan, attempts to interpret Aristotle's ontology as being involved in the logic of self-identical being without self-negative conversion in action from his own dialectical perspective. For Tanabe, the eternal essence or Form is to be mediated by the dynamic character of matter, i.e., the temporality pertinent to the changing movement. For Aristotle, however, the essence or pure activity as the principle of being is devoid of such a dynamic mediation, but is (...) rather regarded as the past being, i.e., what it should be originally and eternally. In other words, for Aristotle, evil and matter are the lacks of goodness and the eternal Form that are identical with the essence of the individual substance. Evil is to be self-negatively mediated to goodness in free action through conversion in Tanabe's perspective. Movement pertaining to matter is not simply an incompletion of pure activity, but is rather self-negatively converted into the activity as the transcendent principle of the dialectical unification of time and eternity, matter and Form, evil and Goodness. The individual existence has freedom to unify the self-contradistinctive opposed moments, i.e., subjective action and objective being in a way of mutually negating conversion. The difference between Tanabe and Aristotle lies in that for Tanabe practice is relevant to the future, whereas for Aristotle contemplation is concerned with eternity as invariable and imperishable being since the past. While Aristotle's logic is confined to the self-identity of being in contemplation, Tanabe's logic is structured by the triadic elements of individuality, species as the relative universal, and genus as the absolute universal in terms of the negative conversion in action. (shrink)

Essentialism as applied to individuals is the claim that for at least some individuals there are properties that those individuals possess essentially. What it is to possess a property essentially is a matter of debate. To possess a property essentially is often taken to be akin to possessing a property necessarily, but stronger, although this is not a feature of Aristotle’s essentialism, according to which essential properties are those thing could not lose without ceasing to exist. Kit Fine (1994) takes (...) essential properties to be those that an object has in virtue of its identity, while other essentialists refer (as Fine also does) to the nature of an object as the source of its essential properties. It is sometimes important to distinguish the essential properties of a thing and the ‘full’ essence of a thing. The latter is the set of the essential properties of a thing, when that set necessarily suffices to determine the thing’s identity. One might hold that something has essential properties without agreeing that it has an identity-determining essence. Essentialism was largely in abeyance during the first two thirds of the twentieth century thanks to the domination of analytic philosophy by anti-metaphysical logical empiricism and the linguistic turn. The rehabilitation of essentialism owes much to the development of a formal apparatus for the understanding of modality more generally, thanks to C. I. Lewis, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and Saul Kripke. Kripke’s discussion of essentialism both about individuals and also about about natural kinds brought essentialism to wider philosophical prominence. Natural kind essentialism, which finds its modern genesis also in the work of Hilary Putnam, claims that natural kinds have essential properties: to say that possession of property P is is part of the essence of the kind K implies that, necessarily, every member or sample of the kind K possesses P. Essentialism about individuals has been linked to thinking about natural kinds by the contentious claim that one of the essential properties of any entity is that it belongs to the natural kind (or kinds) it actually belongs to. In this chapter I shall first outline certain claims and arguments concerning essentialism concerning individuals (Section 2).. (shrink)

The project of grounding necessity in essence often goes together with the model of essence that assimilates the constitutive essence of an object to the definition of it. The paper argues that if the grounding project is to succeed, the definitional model must be questioned. Like any object whatever, a concrete individual is necessarily identical to that individual. It is argued that this necessity can have an essential ground only if the primitive identity property of it or its (...) thisness is essential to it, and the thisness is in its constitutive essence while not in the definition of it. A concrete individual is in essence partly definable but not fully explainable, for the definition of it forms a crucial part of its constitutive essence, but the constitutive essence includes something fundamental beyond definition or explanation. The definitional model must give way to a model of essence that accommodates this. (shrink)

My project in this paper is to fill a gap in Spinoza's theory of metaphysical individuation. In a few brief passages of the Ethics, Spinoza manages to explain his views on the nature of composition and the part-whole relation, the metaphysical facts which ground the individuation of simple bodies and the extended individuals they compose, and the persistence of one and the same individual through time and mereological change. Yet Spinoza nowhere presents a corresponding account of the individuation of (...) simple ideas, or the minds such ideas compose. While it is initially tempting to locate the details of such an account in Spinoza's views on the relation between the mental and physical domains, I argue here that such approaches fail, in conflicting with Spinoza's insistence that the mental and the physical are conceptually and explanatorily independent. By contrast, I show that for Spinoza, each idea essentially possesses the property of affirming the existence of its object, and that such properties are well-suited to serve as the principle of ideal individuation Spinoza never explicitly provided. (shrink)

This chapter discusses one way to understand one of Spinoza's most vital, controversial concepts – essence – and attempts to show how this interpretation of essence illuminates and animates the basic precepts of his political theory. It shows that the radical metaphysics of the Ethics are the beating heart of Spinoza's ethical and political prescriptions. The chapter considers how the knowledge of essences of singular things, scientia intuitiva, is the key to the method by which an individual achieves (...) freedom, virtue, and beatitudo. An idea that involves the unity of the formal and actual essence of a thing in the finite intellect is the object of the third kind of knowledge. Unity, for Spinoza, is a critical theme underlying his metaphysics, his epistemology, and his politics. For Spinoza, man can only achieve wisdom hand‐in‐hand with freedom, that is, hand‐in‐hand with his fellow man. (shrink)

Phenomenology can be roughly described as the theory of the pure essences of phenomena. Yet the meaning of essence and of concepts traditionally tied to it are far from settled. This is especially true given the impact modern science has had on established philosophical views and the need for revisiting certain core notions of philosophy. In this paper I intend to review Husserl’s view on thingness-essence and his conception of the essence of individuals, based mainly in his writings from (...) the time of Logical Investigations, Ideas, and later of Experience and Judgment. Taking account of the work of Lothar Eley in Die Krise des Apriori, among others, I will inquire into the ways in which phenomenology may undermine the view of essences as non-factual, as well as undermine their ontological priority. Doing so may help to shape a conception of material or formal individual essences and generally of essences as concrete objects of experience in virtue of well-defined epistemic ones. (shrink)

Recent metaphysics has turned its focus to two notions that are—as well as having a common Aristotelian pedigree—widely thought to be intimately related: grounding and essence. Yet how, exactly, the two are related remains opaque. We develop a unified and uniform account of grounding and essence, one which understands them both in terms of a generalized notion of identity examined in recent work by Fabrice Correia, Cian Dorr, Agustín Rayo, and others. We argue that the account comports with antecedently plausible (...) principles governing grounding, essence, and identity taken individually, and illuminates how the three interact. We also argue that the account compares favorably to an alternative unification of grounding and essence recently proposed by Kit Fine. (shrink)

According to grounding necessitarianism if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter. Proponents of grounding contingentism argue against this claim, stating that it is possible for the former facts to obtain without necessitating the latter. In this article I discuss a recent argument from restricted accidental generalisations provided by contingentists that advances such possibility. I argue that grounding necessitarianism can be defended against it. To achieve this aim, I postulate a relationship between grounding (...) and essence by introducing a notion of individual essences understood as a set of essential properties that individuate its bearer. According to a proposed view grounding holds in virtue of identities of its relata, which are in turn determined by their respective individual essences. From there I claim that if grounding holds in virtue of the individual essences of its relata, then it is possible to resist the objection from restricted accidental generalisations and maintain a view that grounds necessitates what is grounded. (shrink)

This paper evaluates six contenders which might be invoked by essentialists in order to meet Quine’s challenge, viz., to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the crossworld identity of individuals: (i) an object’s qualitative character; (ii) matter; (iii) origins; (iv) haecceities or primitive non-qualitative thisness properties; (v) “world-indexed properties”; and (iv) individual forms. The first three candidates, I argue, fail to provide conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for the crossworld identity of individuals; the fourth and fifth criteria (...) are open to the charge that they do not succeed in meeting Quine’s demand in an explanatorily adequate fashion. On balance, then, individual forms, or so I propose, deserve to be taken very seriously as a possible response to Quine’s challenge, especially by neo-Aristotelians who are already committed to a hylomorphic conception of composite concrete particular objects for other reasons. Theorists who also accept a non-modal conception of essence, i.e., a conception according to which essence is not reducible to modality, in addition face the further difficult task, over and above what is required to meet Quine’s challenge, of having to explain how an object’s de re modal profile in some way follows from facts about its essence. Haecceities and world-indexed properties, as I indicate, are unlikely to be of much help with respect to this second challenge, while the forms of hylomorphic compounds are in fact well-suited for this purpose. (shrink)

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated in a different way from that in which I had originally interpreted it. Little weight was placed on possible worlds or (...) individual essences. Much weight rested on natural kinds. I thought Ellis to be suggesting that laws of nature attribute essential properties to one grand individual, The World. In fact, Ellis is hostile towards individual essences for any individuals at all, including The World. He is comfortable only with essential properties of kinds, rather than individuals. The Ellis conjecture was that laws of nature attribute essential properties to the natural kind of which the actual world is one (and presumably the only) member. (shrink)

Inquiry into the metaphysics of essence tends to be pursued in a realist and model-theoretic spirit, in the sense that metaphysical vocabulary is used in a metalanguage to model truth conditions for the object-language use of essentialist vocabulary. This essay adapts recent developments in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a nominalist analysis for a variety of essentialist vocabularies. A metalanguage employing explanatory inferences is used to individuate introduction and elimination rules for atomic sentences. The object-language assertions of sentences concerning essences (...) are then interpreted as devices for marking off structural features of the explanatory inferences that, under a given interpretation, constitute the contents of the atoms of the language. On this proposal, object-language essentialist vocabulary is mentioned in a proof-theoretic metalanguage that uses a vocabulary of explanation. The result is a nominalist interpretation of essence as a modality, understood in the grammatical sense as a modification of the copula, and a view of metaphysical inquiry that is closely connected to the explanatory commitments present in first-order inquiry into things like sets, chemicals, and organisms. This result illustrates that some of the presuppositions that have animated analytic metaphysics over the last few decades can be profitably substituted with more practice-oriented conceptions of the forms of reasoning at work in different domains of human knowledge. (shrink)

This essay defends two theses regarding the explanation, or ground, of modality in the early modern period. First, for philosophers in the period, essences ground a range of important modal facts. Second, as the period progresses, we witness increased skepticism about certain modal facts, due to a growing skepticism about the scope or existence of essences. These theses are supported by examination of three case studies: Descartes’ treatment of substance and mode (which forms the core of his ontology); (...) Malebranche’s treatment of causation (which bears on his defense of occasionalism); and Locke’s treatment of necessary connections among properties (which is related to his accounts of individuals and kinds). It is shown that in each case, claims about necessity and possibility take center stage, and that in each case, the status of these claims hinges on the status of claims about essences. (shrink)

The counterintuitive, radical message of Vedanta, the ancient science of self-inquiry, is that reality is non-dual consciousness. What this means and how it benefits people in their quest for freedom from limitation is the subject of this inspirational book. In an accessible style, James Swartz's new book develops teachings introduced in his popular first one, How to Attain Enlightenment, covering topics such as values and the enlightened person, dharma and the essence of enlightenment, and the relationship between consciousness, the (...) class='Hi'>individual, and the total. Demystifying enlightenment, Swartz makes Vedanta understandable to all. (shrink)