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Full Idea
Being gold or being a man is not accidental. ..Such essences are dispositional properties of a very special kind: if an object had such a property and ceased to have it, it would have ceased to exist or have changed (as if gold is transmuted to lead).
Gist of Idea
Dispositional essences are special, as if an object loses them they cease to exist
Source
Ruth Barcan Marcus (Essential Attribution [1971], p.202)
Book Ref
-: 'Nous' [-], p.202
A Reaction
Ruth Marcus is an important founder of modern scientific essentialism, by not only proposing the notion we call rigid designation, but by explicitly defending the essential identities that seem to emerge from modal logic.
| 11180 | Essentialist sentences are not theorems of modal logic, and can even be false [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11181 | Aristotelian essentialism involves a 'natural' or 'causal' interpretation of modal operators [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11182 | If essences are objects with only essential properties, they are elusive in possible worlds [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11183 | The use of possible worlds is to sort properties (not to individuate objects) [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11186 | 'Essentially' won't replace 'necessarily' for vacuous properties like snub-nosed or self-identical [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11185 | 'Is essentially' has a different meaning from 'is necessarily', as they often cannot be substituted [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11184 | Aristotelian essentialism is about shared properties, individuating essentialism about distinctive properties [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11187 | In possible worlds, names are just neutral unvarying pegs for truths and predicates [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11189 | Dispositional essences are special, as if an object loses them they cease to exist [Marcus (Barcan)] |