| 13772 | Is the being or essence of each thing private to each person? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Is the being or essence of each of the things that are something private to each person, as Protagoras tells us? | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.377 BCE], 385e) | |
| A reaction: This kind of drastic personal relativism about essences doesn't sound very plausible, but the idea that essences are private to each culture, or to each language, must certainly be taken seriously. |
| 12251 | Substantial forms are not understood, and explain nothing [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Clearly no explanation can be given by these substantial forms for any natural action, since their defenders admit that they are occult and that they do not understand them themselves, ...so they explain nothing. | |
| From: René Descartes (Letters to Regius [1642], 1642.01), quoted by David S. Oderberg - Real Essentialism 267 n5 | |
| A reaction: [Oderberg gives refs for attack by Locke and Hume, p.66] Descartes' target is Aristotle's hylomorphism. The problem seems to be understanding what Aristotle meant, which is much more than mere 'shape'. More like 'controlling principle'. |
| 16622 | Essence is just an artificial word from logic, giving a way of thinking about substances [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Essence and all other abstract names are words artificial belonging to the art of logic, and signify only the manner how we consider the substance itself. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Letter to Bramhall [1650], 4:308), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 | |
| A reaction: I sympathise quite a lot with this view, but not with its dismissive tone. The key question I take to be: if you reject essences entirely (having read too much physics), how are we going to think about entities in the world in future? |
| 12804 | There are no independent natural kinds - or our classifications have to be subjective [Locke, by Jolley] |
| Full Idea: Locke has two forms of antiessentialism: that there are no natural kinds independently of our own minds; or (weaker) that in practice we classify things on the basis not of their real essences but of their observable properties. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694]) by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences | |
| A reaction: Having recently read Locke, I felt that his real commitment was to the second one. He keeps coming back to the thought that there are real essences out there. It is only his empirical commitment that makes him feel the quest is hopeless. |
| 12547 | We know five properties of gold, but cannot use four of them to predict the fifth one [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Though we see the yellow, and upon trial find the weight, malleableness, fusibility and fixedness of gold, yet because no one of these has evident dependence or necessary connexion with the other, we cannot know if four are there, the fifth will be also. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 4.03.14) | |
| A reaction: Thus it is that knowledge of necessary properties cannot lead us to knowledge of essence, because explanatory dependence is in the opposite direction. The point of knowing essences is to gain increased powers of prediction. |
| 11862 | Leibniz was not an essentialist [Leibniz, by Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Leibniz was not an essentialist. | |
| From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (works [1690]) by David Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed 4.2 n4 | |
| A reaction: Assuming this is right, it is rather helpful, because you can read mountains of Leibniz without ever being quite sure. Mackie says he IS an extreme essentialist, treating all properties as essential. Wiggins makes more sense there. |
| 7161 | The essence of a thing is only an opinion about the 'thing' [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The essence of a thing is only an opinion about the 'thing'. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[150]) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche seems sympathetic to essentialism about natural laws (based on 'power'), but this is the classic rejection of Aristotelian essences, because they are unknowable or unprovable. Personally I think scientists are revealing essences. |
| 14170 | Change is obscured by substance, a thing's nature, subject-predicate form, and by essences [Russell] |
| Full Idea: The notion of change is obscured by the doctrine of substance, by a thing's nature versus its external relations, and by subject-predicate form, so that things can be different and the same. Hence the useless distinction between essential and accidental. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903], §443) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to object to vague unconscious usage of 'essence' by modern thinkers, but allows (teasingly) that medieval thinkers may have been precise about it. It is a fact, in common life, that things can change and be the same. Explain it! |
| 13590 | Essences can make sense in a particular context or enquiry, as the most basic predicates [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The notion of essence makes sense in context. Relative to a particular enquiry, some predicates may play a more basic role than others, or may apply more fixedly; and these may be treated as essential. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Intensions Revisited [1977], p.121) | |
| A reaction: Quine has got a bad press on essentialism, and on modal logic, but I take this point seriously. If you give something a fixed identity by means of essence in some context, you can then go ahead and apply possible world reasoning in that context. |
| 10930 | Quantification into modal contexts requires objects to have an essence [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A reversion to Aristotelian essentialism is required if quantification into modal contexts is to be insisted on. An object must be seen as having some of its traits necessarily. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Reference and Modality [1953], §3) | |
| A reaction: This thought leads directly to Kripke's proposal of rigid designation of objects (and Lewis response of counterparts), which really gets modal logic off the ground. Quine's challenge remains - the modal logic entails a huge metaphysical commitment. |
| 10929 | Aristotelian essence of the object has become the modern essence of meaning [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The Aristotelian notion of essence was the forerunner of the modern notion of intension or meaning. ...Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Two Dogmas of Empiricism [1953], §1) | |
| A reaction: Quine first wants to jettison de re necessity (essence of the object), by shifting it to de dicto necessity (necessity in meaning), but he subsequently rejects that as well, presumably because he doesn't even believe in meanings. |
| 8482 | Mathematicians must be rational but not two-legged, cyclists the opposite. So a mathematical cyclist? [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Mathematicians are necessarily rational, and not necessarily two-legged; cyclists are the opposite. But what of an individual who counts among his eccentricities both mathematics and cycling? | |
| From: Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §41) | |
| A reaction: Quine's view is that the necessity (and essence) depends on how this eccentric is described. If he loses a leg, he must give up cycling; if he loses his rationality, he must give up the mathematics. Quine is wrong. |
| 12136 | Cyclist are not actually essentially two-legged [Brody on Quine] |
| Full Idea: Cyclists are not essentially two-legged (a one-legged cyclist exists, but can't cycle any more), and mathematicians are not essentially rational (as they can lose rationality and continue to exist, though unable to do mathematics). | |
| From: comment on Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §41.5) by Baruch Brody - Identity and Essence 5.1 | |
| A reaction: Was Quine thinking of the nominal essence of this person - that 'cyclists' necessarily cylce, and 'mathematicians' necessarily do some maths? It is as bad to confuse 'necessary' with 'essential' as to confuse 'use' with 'mention'. |
| 5451 | Popper felt that ancient essentialism was a bar to progress [Popper, by Mautner] |
| Full Idea: Karl Popper vehemently rejected the essentialism which underpins Plato and Aristotle, taking it to be a major obstacle to political, moral and scientific progress. | |
| From: report of Karl Popper (Open Society and Its Enemies:Hegel and Marx [1945]) by Thomas Mautner - Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy p.179 | |
| A reaction: This makes Popper sound like an existentialist, which seems unlikely. Modern essentialism would say the opposite about science - that hunting for external imposed laws is a red herring, and we should try to understand essences. |
| 18890 | Putnam smuggles essentialism about liquids into his proof that water must be H2O [Salmon,N on Putnam] |
| Full Idea: In the full exposition of Putnam's mechanism for generating the necessary truth that water is H2O, we find that the mechanism employs a certain nontrivial general principle of essentialism concerning liquid substances as a crucial premise. | |
| From: comment on Hilary Putnam (The Meaning of 'Meaning' [1975]) by Nathan Salmon - Reference and Essence (1st edn) 6.23.1 | |
| A reaction: This charge, that Kripke and Putnam smuggle the essentialism into their semantics, rather than deriving it, is the nub of Salmon's criticism of them. It seems to me that a new world view emerged while those two where revising the semantics. |
| 15753 | Essences might support Resemblance Nominalism, but they are too coarse and ill-defined [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: A sophisticated Resemblance theory can appeal to the natures of the resembling things, from which the resemblances flow. The natures are suitably internal, but are as coarse as the things themselves (and perhaps are the things themselves). | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Properties [1992], 1) | |
| A reaction: Note that this is essentialism as an underpinning for Resemblance Nominalism. His objection is that he just can't believe in essences, because they are too 'coarse' - which I take to mean that we cannot distinguish the boundaries of an essence. |
| 13578 | The old idea that identity depends on essence and behaviour is rejected by the empiricists [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: The old Aristotelian idea that the identity of a thing might depend on its essential nature, which would dispose it to behave in certain ways, is firmly rejected by empiricists. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Scientific Essentialism [2001], 1.10) | |
| A reaction: Ellis is accusing empiricists of having a falsely passive concept of objects. This dispute is best captured in the disagreement between Locke and Leibniz on the subject. |
| 8555 | There is no subset of properties which guarantee a thing's identity [Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: There is, putting aside historical properties and 'identity properties', no subset of the properties of a thing which constitutes an individual essence, so that having those properties is necessary and sufficient for being that particular thing. | |
| From: Sydney Shoemaker (Causality and Properties [1980], §05) | |
| A reaction: He asserts this rather dogmatically. If he says a thing can lose its essence, I agree, but it seems to me that there must be a group of features which will guarantee that (if they are present) it has that identity. |
| 14632 | Quine may have conflated de re and de dicto essentialism, but there is a real epistemological problem [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: The unfriendly response to Quine's objection to essentialism is that it conflates the de re and the de dicto. The friendly response is that behind that conflation is a real epistemological problem for essentialism. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: He cites Richard Cartwright 1968 for the friendly response. The epistemological question is how we can know the essentialness of an essence. |
| 15266 | We say the essence of particles is energy, but only so we can tell a story about the nature of things [Harré/Madden] |
| Full Idea: The essential nature of matter and radiation is energy, so it is maintained, but the point of maintaining this is precisely to allow one to make use of a notion of the nature of things. | |
| From: Harré,R./Madden,E.H. (Causal Powers [1975], 6.III) | |
| A reaction: They are defending essentialism, but this seems to be a counterexample, of our need to postulate essences where there are none. It makes our explanations work better, but at the cost of commitment to a 'quasi-substance' (Idea 15265). |
| 13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
| Full Idea: Apparently those who think essentialism unintelligible see support for their position in the doctrine that necessary truths are all analytic. Only relative to some mode of designation does it make sense to speak of an object as necessarily this or that. | |
| From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
| A reaction: He has in mind Quine and his mathematician-cyclist (Idea 8482). Personally I have no problems with the example. No one is essentially a cyclist - that isn't what essence is. Two-legged people can be cyclists. |
| 12762 | Bare particular anti-essentialism makes no sense within modal logic semantics [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: I argue that one cannot make semantical sense out of bare particular anti-essentialism within the framework of standard semantics for modal logic. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Anti-essentialism [1979], p.71) | |
| A reaction: Stalnaker characterises the bare particular view as ANTI-essentialist, because he has defined essence in terms of necessary properties. The bare particular seems to allow the possibility of Aristotle being a poached egg. |
| 14077 | Essentialism for concreta is false, since they can come apart under two concepts [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism for the class of concrete things is false, since a statue necessarily fulfils a condition as 'Goliath', but only contingently fulfils it as 'lumpl'. On the other hand, essentialism for the class of individual concepts can be true. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: This rests on his definition of essentialism in Idea 14076. He rests his essentialism about concepts on an account given by Carnap ('Meaning and Necessity' §41). The essence of a statue and the essence of a lump of clay do seem distinct. |
| 14638 | Essentialism is false, because it implies the existence of necessary singular propositions [McMichael] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism entails the existence of necessary singular propositions that are not instances of necessary generalizations. Therefore, since there are no such propositions, essentialism is false. | |
| From: Alan McMichael (The Epistemology of Essentialist Claims [1986], I) | |
| A reaction: This summarises the attack which McMichael wishes to deal with. I am wickedly tempted to say that essences actually have a contingent existence (or a merely hypothetical dependent necessity), and this objection might be grist for my mill. |
| 14678 | Any property is attached to anything in some possible world, so I am a radical anti-essentialist [Salmon,N] |
| Full Idea: By admitting possible worlds of unlimited variation and recombination, I simply abandon true metaphysical essentialism. By my lights, any property is attached to anything in some possible world or other. I am a closet radical anti-essentialist. | |
| From: Nathan Salmon (The Logic of What Might Have Been [1989], II) | |
| A reaction: Salmon includes impossible worlds within his scheme of understanding. It strikes me that this is metaphysical system which tells us nothing about how things are: it is sort of 'logical idealist'. Later he talks of 'we essentialists'. |
| 14225 | Critics say that essences are too mysterious to be known [Shalkowski] |
| Full Idea: According to critics, the thorniest problem for essentialism is the question of our knowledge of essence. It is usually at this point that terms of abuse such as 'dark', 'mysterious', and 'occult' are wheeled out. | |
| From: Scott Shalkowski (Essence and Being [2008], 'Ess and Know') | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to think that the existence of essences can be fairly conclusively inferred, but that attributing a precise identity to them is the biggest challenge. |
| 12257 | Could we replace essence with collections of powers? [Oderberg] |
| Full Idea: Why not do away with talk of essences and replace it with talk of powers pure and simple, or reduce essences to collections of powers? But then what unites the powers, and could a power be lost, and is there entailment between the powers? | |
| From: David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Bennett and Hacker 2003 for this view] The point would seem to be that in addition to the powers, there are also identity and unity and kind-membership to be explained. Oderberg says the powers flow from the essence. |
| 15026 | Essence (even if nonmodal) is not fundamental in metaphysics [Sider] |
| Full Idea: We should not regard nonmodal essence as being metaphysically basic: fundamental theories need essence no more than they need modality. | |
| From: Theodore Sider (Writing the Book of the World [2011], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: He is discussing Kit Fine, and notes that Fine offers a nonmodal view of essence, but still doesn't make it fundamental. I am a fan of essences, but making them fundamental in metaphysics seems unlikely. |
| 15173 | That the essence of water is its microstructure is a convention, not a discovery [Sidelle] |
| Full Idea: The necessity to water of whatever is found out to be the water's microstructure is given by convention, and is not something which is discovered. | |
| From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.2) | |
| A reaction: A powerful point. It shows the authority of science that we accept the microstructure as the essence. The essences of statues and people are definitely not their microstructures. One H2O molecule isn't water. Why not? Macro-properties count too! |
| 15709 | Essentialism is useful for predictions, but it is not the actual structure of reality [Gelman] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism is a reasoning heuristic that allows us to make fairly good predictions much of the time, but it should not be confused with the structure of reality. | |
| From: Susan A. Gelman (The Essential Child [2003], 11 'Discussion') | |
| A reaction: She particularly cites biology as the area where it might be inaccurate. I'm beginning to think that the operations of induction are the place to look for an good understanding of essentialism. |
| 14192 | Essentialism must deal with charges of arbitrariness, and failure to reduce de re modality [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: Two objections to deep essentialism are that it falters when faced with a skeptical objection concerning arbitrariness, and the need for a reductive account of de re modality. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], Intro) | |
| A reaction: An immediate response to the second objection might be to say that modal facts about things are not reducible. The charge of arbitrariness (i.e. total arbitrariness, not just a bit of uncertainty) is the main thing a theory of essences must deal with. |
| 14197 | An object's modal properties don't determine its possibilities [Paul,LA] |
| Full Idea: I reject the view that an object's de re modal properties determine its relations to possibilia. | |
| From: L.A. Paul (In Defense of Essentialism [2006], §3) | |
| A reaction: You'll have to read Paul to see why, but I flat disagree with her on this. The whole point of accepting such properties is to determine the modal profile of the thing, and hence see how it can fit into and behave in the world. |
| 15147 | Cluster kinds are explained simply by sharing some properties, not by an 'essence' [Chakravartty] |
| Full Idea: The fact that members of some cluster kinds are subjects of causal generalizations reflects the degree to which they share causally efficacious properties, not the fact that they may be composed of essence kinds per se. | |
| From: Anjan Chakravarrty (Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences [2012], 2) | |
| A reaction: I think this is right. I am a fan of individual essences, but not of kind essences. I take kinds, and kind explanations, to be straightforward inductive generalisations from individuals. Extreme stabilities give the illusion of a kind essence. |
| 17876 | Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates [Almog] |
| 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. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 11) | |
| 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? |