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Full Idea
The key for the essentialist is classificatory predication. It is only a subsequent extension of this prime idea that leads us to cobble together enough such essential predications to make an individuative essential property.
Gist of Idea
Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates
Source
Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 11)
Book Ref
-: 'Journal of Philosophy' [-], p.376
A Reaction
So the essence is just a cross-reference of all the ways we can think of to classify it? I don't think so. Which are the essential classifications?
| 17864 | Defining an essence comes no where near giving a thing's nature [Almog] |
| 17863 | Essences promise to reveal reality, but actually drive us away from it [Almog] |
| 17866 | Essential definition aims at existence conditions and structural truths [Almog] |
| 17867 | If a concept is not compact, it will not be presentable to finite minds [Almog] |
| 17868 | Surface accounts aren't exhaustive as they always allow unintended twin cases [Almog] |
| 17869 | Kripke and Putnam offer an intermediary between real and nominal essences [Almog] |
| 17871 | Fregean meanings are analogous to conceptual essence, defining a kind [Almog] |
| 17872 | Definitionalists rely on snapshot-concepts, instead of on the real processes [Almog] |
| 17873 | Water must be related to water, just as tigers must be related to tigers [Almog] |
| 17870 | Alien 'tigers' can't be tigers if they are not related to our tigers [Almog] |
| 17876 | Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates [Almog] |
| 17877 | The number series is primitive, not the result of some set theoretic axioms [Almog] |