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Full Idea
We can remain anti-essentialist while allowing some necessary properties: those essential to everything (self-identity), relational properties (being what it is), and world-indexed properties (being snub-nosed-only-in-Kronos).
Gist of Idea
Necessarily self-identical, or being what it is, or its world-indexed properties, aren't essential
Source
Robert C. Stalnaker (Anti-essentialism [1979], p.73)
Book Ref
Stalnaker,Robert C.: 'Ways a World Might Be' [OUP 2003], p.73
A Reaction
[a summary] He defined essential properties as necessary properties (Idea 12761), and now backpeddles. World-indexed properties are an invention of Plantinga, as essential properties to don't limit individuals. But they are necessary, not essential!
Related Idea
Idea 12761 An essential property is one had in all the possible worlds where a thing exists [Stalnaker]
| 12761 | An essential property is one had in all the possible worlds where a thing exists [Stalnaker] |
| 12762 | Bare particular anti-essentialism makes no sense within modal logic semantics [Stalnaker] |
| 12763 | Necessarily self-identical, or being what it is, or its world-indexed properties, aren't essential [Stalnaker] |
| 12764 | For the bare particular view, properties must be features, not just groups of objects [Stalnaker] |
| 12765 | Why imagine that Babe Ruth might be a billiard ball; nothing useful could be said about the ball [Stalnaker] |
| 12766 | Logical space is abstracted from the actual world [Stalnaker] |