The advent of contemporary evolutionary theory ushered in the eventual decline of Aristotelian Essentialism (Æ) – for it is widely assumed that essence does not, and cannot have any proper place in the age of evolution. This paper argues that this assumption is a mistake: if Æ can be suitably evolved, it need not face extinction. In it, I claim that if that theory’s fundamental ontology consists of dispositional properties, and if its characteristic metaphysical machinery is interpreted within the (...) framework of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology, an evolved essentialism is available. The reformulated theory of Æ offered in this paper not only fails to fall prey to the typical collection of criticisms, but is also independently both theoretically and empirically plausible. The paper contends that, properly understood, essence belongs in the age of evolution. (shrink)

This paper first argues that we can bring out a tension between the following three popular doctrines: (i) the canonical reduction of metaphysical modality to essence, due to Fine, (ii) contingentism, which says that possibly something could have failed to be something, and (iii) the doctrine that metaphysical modality obeys the modal logic S5. After presenting two such arguments (one from the theorems of S4 and another from the theorems of B), I turn to exploring various conclusions we might (...) draw in light of these results, and argue that none comes cost free. In the course of laying out possible responses to my arguments, we'll have a chance to evaluate various doctrines about the interplay between contingency and essence, as well as develop some alternative reductions of metaphysical modality to essence. I don't decisively come down in favor of one response over the others, though I say some things that point towards the conclusion that essence has no role to play in reducing metaphysical modality. (shrink)

Schelling’s masterpiece investigating evil and freedom.

Cet ouvrage n'est autre qu'une étude a-méthodique sur l'essence phénoménologique humaine appuyée sur la philosophie de Michel Henry. Elle gravite autour de la notion de douleur basée sur la passivité précoce de l'être par rapport à lui-même et dans le cadre révélateur de l'affectivité. En d'autres termes, la révélation de l'être tel qu'il est dépeint dans sa passion. Une nouvelle conception de la corporéité, du temps et du langage vient de la tonalité affective de base de la douleur. Comprendre (...) ces thèmes en les reliant à l'être masculin est crucial pour ne pas le scinder en champs ou dimensions inconciliables qui ne le laisseraient pas comprendre dans ce qu'il fait, dit ou vit, c'est-à-dire sur ce que l'être est vécu -- Contracubierta. (shrink)

BOOK Z OF THE METAPHYSICS is generally held to contain Aristotle's most comprehensive investigation of what we have come to call essence. One might reasonably be led back to that text, then, by the recent renewal of interest in essentialism, more particularly, by the debate about the merits of "Aristotelian essentialism." This is the label Quine employed in objecting to the doctrine--which he thought quantified modal logic was compelled to accept--that objects have, independent of our ways of specifying them, (...) necessary properties distinguishable from contingent ones; it is the label commonly applied to a thesis about general essence, referring to those properties which make an individual a member of a certain kind without individuating one such member from another. Whether a defense of "Aristotelian essentialism" is to be found in book Z of the Metaphysics, however, is far from obvious. The contemporary interest in defending essentialism, for one thing, is associated with a variety of related problems, including those of identity over time and across possible worlds, the status of natural kinds and of the laws of nature; and while Aristotle's discussion may not be irrelevant to these issues, they are not what is explicitly thematized in Book Z. The chief and primary and practically only concern "for us," Aristotle announces, is to theorize about being in its primary sense, what it is. It is not only in this concern that Aristotle may sound rather remote to contemporary ears, but, perhaps most conspicuously, in the odd formula he coins for what is traditionally translated "essence," namely, "the what-it-was-to-be." We are especially led to wonder just what notion Aristotle has in mind, and what role it plays, by the puzzling question he pursues through the central chapters of book Z: is each thing the same as its what-it-was-to-be? (shrink)

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.

Originally published under the title: Tsong Khapa's Speech of gold in the Essence of true eloquence.

In his influential article ‘Essence and Modality’, Fine proposes a definition of necessity in terms of the primitive essentialist notion ‘true in virtue of the nature of’. Fine’s proposal is suggestive, but it admits of different interpretations, leaving it unsettled what the precise formulation of an Essentialist definition of necessity should be. In this paper, four different versions of the definition are discussed: a singular, a plural reading, and an existential variant of Fine’s original suggestion and an alternative version (...) proposed by Correia which is not based on Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. The first main point of the paper is that the singular reading is untenable. The second that given plausible background assumptions, the remaining three definitions are extensionally equivalent. The third is that, this equivalence notwithstanding, Essentialists should adopt Correia’s version of the definition, since both the existential variant, which has de facto been adopted as the standard version of the definition in the literature, and the plural reading suffer from problems connected to Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. (shrink)

In this book van der Leeuw discusses the horizontal path to God and the vertical paths descending from God and ascending to Him. If God Himself appears, it is in a totally different manner, which results not in intelligible utterance, but in proclamation; and it is with this that theology has to deal." Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. (...) These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This is a transcription of a debate on the concept of a person conducted in Moscow in 1983. David Bakhurst argues that Evald Ilyenkov's social constructivist conception of personhood, founded on Marx's thesis that the human essence is the ensemble of social relations, is either false or trivially true. F. T. Mikhailov, V. S. Bibler, V. A. Lektorsky and V. V. Davydov critically assess Bakhurst's arguments, elucidate and contextualize Ilyenkov's views, and defend, in contrasting ways, the claim that human (...) individuals are socially constituted beings. Issues discussed include: the concepts of activity (dejatel'nost') and community (obenija) and their relevance to the notions of mind and personhood; self-consciousness and its relation to personal identity; naturalism in Soviet thought. Translated from the Russian. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's fearlessness towards speaking the body has earned for her work the dismissive label “essentialist.” But Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un suggest that essence may not be the unitary, monolithic, in short, essentialist category that anti-essentialists so often presume it to be. Irigaray strategically deploys essentialism for at least two reasons: first, to reverse and to displace Jacques Lacan's phallomorphism; and second, to expose the contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian (...) metaphysics which denies women access to “Essence” while at the same time positing the essence of “Woman” precisely as non-essential. (shrink)

To some it is a shallow platitude that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component. To others, it is an empirical hypothesis with accumulating support. To yet others it is a false dogma. In this chapter, I defend the claim that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component, confining the claim to adults with ordinary speech and hearing. It is one thing, I emphasize, to assert that inner speech often, or even typically, has an auditory-phonological component—quite another to propose that (...) it always does. When forced to argue for the stronger point, we stand to make a number of interesting discoveries about inner speech itself, and about our means for discriminating it from other psycholinguistic phenomena. Establishing the stronger conclusion also provides new leverage on debates concerning how we should conceive of, diagnose, and explain auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia. (shrink)

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 y such that Philip gave x to y, have the holding conditions they do. The account is meant to be mainly of intrinsic interest, but I hope that it goes some distance toward answering an objection to classical theories of propositions put forward by King (2014), who writes that ‘since the classical conception of propositions as things that have truth conditions by their very natures and independently of minds and languages is incapable of explaining how or why propositions have truth conditions, it is unacceptable’ (2014: 47). Propositions do have their truth conditions ‘by their very natures’ and ‘independently of minds and languages’. But a fact about a given entity can hold by the very nature of that entity without being a fundamental fact. I argue that this is plausibly the case for atomic Russellian propositions and the facts about their truth conditions. A fact about the truth conditions of such a proposition holds by the very nature of the given proposition but is metaphysically grounded in facts about that proposition’s parts and their essences. If my account is correct, then the supposedly intractable problem of explaining why the given propositions have the truth conditions they do reduces to the problem of explaining why relations have the holding essences they do, which few seem to have found worrisome . (shrink)

It is usually agreed that the Revelation Thesis about experience – the idea that the knowledge we gain by having an experience somehow “reveals” the essence, or nature, of this experience – only requires that we know the essence of the experience, not that we know, of this essence, that it is the essence of the experience. I contest this agreement. In the light of what I call the “Essentiality of Essence Principle”– the principle that (...) whatever is in the essence of something is also essentially so – I argue that the Revelation Thesis does require that we know, of the essence of an experience, that it is the essence of the experience, and draw some conclusions about the plausibility of that thesis. (shrink)

Three claims about essential properties are frequently advanced in recent discussions: (1) a property belongs essentially to a thing only if that thing would cease to exist without that property, (2) an essential property is explanatory, And (3) an essential property is such that it must belong to everything to which it belongs. I argue that the "only if" in (1) cannot be changed to "if and only if" and (1) needs to be supplemented by (2), And that (2) is (...) an indispensable feature of aristotle's view of essential properties and that it casts doubt on (3), Although (2) is usually assumed to provide a reason for (3). (shrink)

J. L. Mackie's famous claim that Locke ‘anticipates’ Kripke's Causal Theory of Reference rests, I suggest, upon a pair of important misunderstandings. Contra Mackie, as well as the more recent accounts of Paul Guyer and Michael Ayers, Lockean Real Essences consist of those features of an entity from which all of its experienceable properties can be logically deduced; thus a substantival Real Essence consists of features of a Real Constitution plus logically necessary objective connections between them and features of (...) some particular Nominal Essence. Furthermore, what Locke actually anticipates is the most significant contemporary challenge to the CTR: the qua‐problem. (shrink)

L'une des voies d'accès légitimes à l'oeuvre foisonnante de Heidegger consiste à s'attacher à l'intérêt tout particulier qu'elle porte à la poésie dont il donnera, en effet, à partir du milieu des années trente - mais sans jamais la développer dans toutes ses conséquences - une interprétation originale et tout à fait remarquable. La grande poésie bien comprise n'aurait rien à voir avec le domaine subjectif de l'expression de sentiments, du témoignage d'un vécu intime, mais serait tout au contraire le (...) lieu même de la manifestation de la vérité originelle. Elle constituerait ainsi l'essence profonde de la langue comme dévoilement d'un monde et comme forme originelle de la pensée, laquelle est toujours pensée de l'étant en son être. C'est en s'efforçant de mettre pleinement au jour et dans toutes ses conséquences le sens d'une telle conception ontologique de la poésie que ce livre aboutit alors au constat que cette voie d'accès à l'oeuvre heideggérienne n'est - peut-être - rien d'autre que la "voie royale" permettant d'en donner enfin une lecture d'ensemble cohérente et complète. Et il apparaît alors que la déconstruction heideggérienne de la philosophie traditionnelle - qui conduit à rétrocéder vers l'essence poétique de la pensée reniée à partir de Platon - ne s'accomplit pas contre, mais bien pour celle-ci, car elle apporte la réponse originelle à la question de l'être, laquelle a toujours été la question fondamentale de la philosophie, mais que, dès le début, elle posait mal. (shrink)

The purpose of the present paper is to provide a way of understanding systems of logic of essence by introducing a new semantic framework for them. Three central results are achieved: first, the now standard Fitting semantics for the propositional logic of evidence is adapted in order to provide a new, simplified semantics for the propositional logic of essence; secondly, we show how it is possible to construe the concept of necessary truth explicitly by using the concept of (...) essential truth; finally, Fitting semantics is adapted in order to present a simplified semantics for the quantified logic of essence. (shrink)

Essentialists claim that at least some individuals or kinds have essences. This raises an important but little-discussed question: how do we come to know what the essence of something is? This paper examines Aristotle’s answer to this question. One influential interpretation (viz., the Explanationist Interpretation) is carefully expounded, criticized, and then refined. Particular attention is given to what Aristotle says about this issue in DA I.1, APo II.2, and APo II.8. It is argued that the epistemological claim put forward (...) in DA I.1 differs from that put forward in APo II.2 and II.8, contrary to what has been claimed by Explanationists, and that each of these distinct epistemological claims rests on a distinct non-epistemological thesis about essence. Consequently, an ‘Enriched Explanationist Interpretation’ is developed which takes into account both of the aforementioned elements in Aristotle’s epistemology of essence. The paper concludes by highlighting an insight the preceding exegetical discussion offers to contemporary essentialists seeking to explain how we come to know what something’s essence is. (shrink)

Moral phenomenology has enjoyed a resurgence lately, and within the field, a trend has emerged: uniform rejection of the idea that the experience of making ‘direct’ moral judgments has any phenomenal essence, that is, any phenomenal property or properties that are always present and that distinguish these experiences from experiences of making non-direct- moral judgments. This article examines existing arguments for this anti-essentialism and finds them wanting. While acknowledging that phenomenological reflection is an unstable pursuit, it is maintained here (...) that phenomenological essentialism about a certain domain of direct moral judgment, namely direct judgment of obligation and prohibition, is more credible than has been recognized. The positive proposal is to rehabilitate something close to Maurice Mandelbaum’s essentialism, specifically to maintain that direct moral judgment ’s phenomenal essence is arguably its felt categorical demand. The key to making this argument is to assume a ‘rich view’ of moral consciousness, the view that phenomenal features of moral judgment might be present even when they are not attended to. This assumption is controversial, but it is warranted by two considerations. First, though controversial, the rich view is intuitively plausible. Second, it reveals that the existing arguments against the kind of essentialism defended here appear to tacitly presuppose an equally controversial – and arguably less intuitive – rejection of the rich view. (shrink)

Early in the Logic of Essence, the second main part of Hegelian Logic, Hegel identifies a logical structure, seeming (Schein), with “the phenomenon of scepticism.” The present paper has two aims: first, to flesh this identification out by describing the argument that leads up to it; and, second, to argue that it is mistaken. I will proceed as follows. Section 1 deciphers the opening statement of the Logic of Essence, “the truth of being is essence,” by specifying (...) the meaning of each of its composing terms. The discussion opens the way for deliberation on the meaning of the notion of seeming, since seeming proves to be what remains of being in the structure of essence. This is done in section 2. It is also shown therein that seeming takes two logical forms, dualistic seeming and monistic seeming. Section 3 argues that Hegel identifies scepticism only with dualistic seeming, and that the scepticism he has in mind is what one may call “subjective scepticism,” namely a scepticism grounded in the subject of cognition. The section concludes that Hegel, judged by his own standards, is mistaken in this identification. Finally, section 4 considers Robert Pippin’s objection to the above conclusion and offers a rejoinder. (shrink)

We show the Boxdot Conjecture holds for a limited but familiar range of Lemmon-Scott axioms. We re-introduce the language of essence and accident, first introduced by J. Marcos, and show how it aids our strategy.

Powers are properties defined by what they do. The focus of the large majority of the powers literature has been mainly put on explicating the (multifaceted) results of the production of a power in certain (multifaceted) initial conditions: but all this causal complexity is bound to be—and, in fact, it has proved to be—quite difficult to handle. In this paper we take a different approach by focusing on the very activity of producing those multifaceted manifestations themselves. In this paper, we (...) propose an original account of what the essence of a power consists in which stems from a radical reconceptualisation of power-causation according to which counterfactuals are to be explained away by powers, and not vice-versa. We call this approach the dynamical operator account of powers. According to this account, the causal role of powers consists in their ensuring that the ontological transition from a stimulus S to a manifestation M happens. Powers thus have a dynamical essence which consists in the fundamental activity of generating the counterfactuals typically associated with them. We show that if one conceptualises this functional activity as the metaphysical fulcrum around which counterfactual-based causation revolves, one is granted not only an improved methodology to individuate powers but also a better understanding of their knowability, modality and directedness. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the basic meaning of ousia in Plato’s philosophical use of the term. “Basic” is not intended as “the strongest”, let alone “exclusive”, insofar as the semantics of ousia encompasses a variety of philosophical meanings. On the contrary, the basic meaning is proposed to be the elementary semantic component of ousia, which is present in the background of Plato’s quasi‑technical use of the term and marks the difference from its ordinary meaning. In view (...) of this, a “genetic” aspect is firstly considered, that is, the connection with the Socratic question “What is X?”. Thereafter, a brief mention to Plato’s conception of language and its relation to reality is made, focusing on the notion of eponymy. This because Plato’s coinage of the philosophical semantics of ousia gives this term the role of an eponym, in the sense that its prominent value is the reference to the Forms, but this does not exclude that it may refer to other types of entities. In the last two sections of the paper, a number of passages from Plato’s works are examined to show that the basic meaning of ousia ultimately is “determined existence”, inasmuch as it designates any thing existing with its own peculiar feature. For ousiai can be empirical things as well as Forms, which implies that the meaning of Plato’s ousia should not be understood in the light of an substance/accident relation. (shrink)

Michel Haar argues that Heidegger went too far in transferring all traditional properties of man to being.

When aristotle identifies form with substance he may have sufficiently refuted heraclitus' contention that we cannot step into the same river twice, But he is left with two problems: (1) how an object can have matter but be identical to its essence and different from its matter; and (2) there are some questions about the conditions for identity of a substance across time. (staff).

This chapter examines Edmund Husserl’s notion of idea in the Kantian sense with the aim of clarifying the distinction between ideas and essences. In particular, the chapter focuses on the occurrences of the notion of idea in the Kantian sense in Ideas I, identifies its core features, and explains why the notion of idea should not to be conflated with the phenomenologically relevant notion of essence. The chapter then points to doubts about the givenness of ideas in the Kantian (...) sense and argues that, once the notions of essence and of idea are disentangled, those doubts have no bearing on whether essences merit a place within phenomenology. (shrink)

Perhaps in addition to language being a potential medium of domain-general thought, as suggested by Carruthers, language may also play another role in conceptual development: Words are “essence placeholders.” Evidence is presented from studies on categorization, object individuation, and inductive inference in infancy. The assumption that words are essence placeholders may be a mechanism by which infants acquire kind concepts.

The paper focuses on Priestley’s complex views on the essence of God in connection with his materialism, elaborated in the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777/ 1782). This issue is crucial if one wishes to get a clear idea of what Priestley’s materialism amounts to; whether it is mainly a thesis about the material grounds of the human mind (“psychological materialism”), or a more far-reaching one about what kind of substances exist in the world (a version of “ontological (...) materialism”). The claim that God may be material allows for the most radical version of ontological materialism according to which everything in the world is material, without altogether denying that God exists. In fact, Priestley considers and partially defends at least three different views on the potential materiality of God: (1) an agnostic stance that is his official view, (2) materialism about God based on his own theory of matter, and (3) “gross” materialism about God. The aim of the paper is to analyze these three views, in particular concerning what kind of materialism they support and whether they can contribute to the consistent Christian materialism Priestley envisaged. (shrink)

This paper addresses D. C. Williams’s question, “How can Leibniz know that he is a member of the actual world and not merely a possible monad on the shelf of essence?” A variety of answers are considered. Ultimately, it is argued that no particular perception of a state of affairs in the world can warrant knowledge of one’s actuality, nor can the awareness of any property within oneself; rather, it is the nature of experience itself, with the flow of (...) perceptions, that guarantees our actuality. A consequence of this view is that no non-actual individuals can truly be said to experience their worlds, nor can they ask the question if they are actual or not. (shrink)

descartes appears to intentionally distance his a priori argument for God from the conceptual orientation of earlier arguments by insisting that God's true and immutable nature is something that is real whether he conceives it or not. I find within me countless ideas of things which even though they may not exist anywhere outside me still cannot be called nothing; for although in a sense they can be thought of at will, they are not my invention but have their own (...) true and immutable natures.1 Descartes's idea of a triangle, for instance, is a conception of a true and immutable nature that may be conceived whether any actual triangles do or ever have existed, and that is neither invented by nor dependent on his... (shrink)

To reconcile true claims of de re necessity with the supposedly contingent existence of the concrete objects those claims are typically about, Kripkean essentialists invoke weak necessity. The claim that a is necessarily F is held to be equivalent to the claim that necessarily, if a exists then a is F. This strategy faces a barrage of serious objections a proper subset of which shows that the strategy fails to achieve its intended purpose. Relief can be provided via recourse to (...) a markedly non-Kripkean version of essentialism.1. (shrink)

Marcel Gauchet argues that whatever impulse previously gave rise to religion is now fully translated by the values of representative politics, empirical method, future orientation and productivity as an end in itself. The good and productive citizen replaces the dutiful Christian. His foundational thesis is twofold: (a) religion is the surrender of human autonomy to a power other than human beings, issuing in a hierarchical social structure thought to be given by nature; and (b), paradoxically, religion has at the same (...) time been the impulse to move away from religion. Christianity in particular is “the religion to exit from religion”, propelling society, particularly in the West, toward a disenchanted world-view, one that is non-supernaturalistic and implies non-hierarchical social arrangements. In recounting his argument, I conclude by agreeing with (b) but disagreeing with (a). I suggest that what Gauchet terms “religion” is better thought of in terms of Sartre’s concept of “bad faith”. In this project, Sartre’s – and Gauchet’s – concept of human freedom in terms of the power of “refusal” may well be complemented by the understanding of the person as empowered through interpersonal solidarity. I argue that this supplies a corrective to Gauchet’s interpretation of Christianity, and, further, is a reason to move away from his liberal idea of the state as neutral towards religions. As the secular and humanist re-articulation of religious traditions, the democratic state of its nature challenges rival interpretations of those traditions, whether fundamentalist or reductionist. (shrink)

This article examines the pragmatic conception of self. It describes the views of classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead on the concept of self. It explains the pragmatic concept of self reinforces the agentive idea that what we do makes us who we are. It suggests that there is no pre-established certainty in the self and that it is marked by fallibility. It outlines the pragmatist assault on the Cartesian picture of the self (...) and contrasts it with the fallible self of pragmatism. (shrink)

The development of the notion of continuous physical quantity is traced from Aristotle to Aquinas to Suarez. It is concluded that Aristotle’s divisibility definition fails to excavate the ontological core of material quantification. Although the basic germ of the solution to the problem is discovered in Aquinas, it is Suarez who fully articulates the essence of continuous physical quantity with his explicit concept of aptitudinal extension — which has crucial theological implications. Résumé Nous considérons ici le développement de la (...) notion de quantité physique continue, d’Aristote à Thomas d’Aquin à Suarez. Nous concluons que la définition d’Aristote en termes de divisibilité ne parvient pas à dégager le noyau ontologique de la quantification matérielle. Encore que le germe fondamental de la solution au problème soit découvert par Thomas d’Aquin, c’est Suarez qui articule pleinement l’essence de la quantité physique continue, grâce à son concept explicite d’extension « aptitudinale » — dont les implications théologiques sont cruciales. (shrink)