| 13772 | Is the being or essence of each thing private to each person? [Plato] |
| 12251 | Substantial forms are not understood, and explain nothing [Descartes] |
| 16622 | Essence is just an artificial word from logic, giving a way of thinking about substances [Hobbes] |
| 12804 | There are no independent natural kinds - or our classifications have to be subjective [Locke, by Jolley] |
| 12547 | We know five properties of gold, but cannot use four of them to predict the fifth one [Locke] |
| 11862 | Leibniz was not an essentialist [Leibniz, by Wiggins] |
| 7161 | The essence of a thing is only an opinion about the 'thing' [Nietzsche] |
| 14170 | Change is obscured by substance, a thing's nature, subject-predicate form, and by essences [Russell] |
| 13590 | Essences can make sense in a particular context or enquiry, as the most basic predicates [Quine] |
| 10930 | Quantification into modal contexts requires objects to have an essence [Quine] |
| 10929 | Aristotelian essence of the object has become the modern essence of meaning [Quine] |
| 8482 | Mathematicians must be rational but not two-legged, cyclists the opposite. So a mathematical cyclist? [Quine] |
| 12136 | Cyclist are not actually essentially two-legged [Brody on Quine] |
| 5451 | Popper felt that ancient essentialism was a bar to progress [Popper, by Mautner] |
| 18890 | Putnam smuggles essentialism about liquids into his proof that water must be H2O [Salmon,N on Putnam] |
| 15753 | Essences might support Resemblance Nominalism, but they are too coarse and ill-defined [Armstrong] |
| 13578 | The old idea that identity depends on essence and behaviour is rejected by the empiricists [Ellis] |
| 8555 | There is no subset of properties which guarantee a thing's identity [Shoemaker] |
| 14632 | Quine may have conflated de re and de dicto essentialism, but there is a real epistemological problem [Jackson] |
| 15266 | We say the essence of particles is energy, but only so we can tell a story about the nature of things [Harré/Madden] |
| 13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
| 12762 | Bare particular anti-essentialism makes no sense within modal logic semantics [Stalnaker] |
| 14077 | Essentialism for concreta is false, since they can come apart under two concepts [Gibbard] |
| 14638 | Essentialism is false, because it implies the existence of necessary singular propositions [McMichael] |
| 14678 | Any property is attached to anything in some possible world, so I am a radical anti-essentialist [Salmon,N] |
| 14225 | Critics say that essences are too mysterious to be known [Shalkowski] |
| 12257 | Could we replace essence with collections of powers? [Oderberg] |
| 15026 | Essence (even if nonmodal) is not fundamental in metaphysics [Sider] |
| 15173 | That the essence of water is its microstructure is a convention, not a discovery [Sidelle] |
| 15709 | Essentialism is useful for predictions, but it is not the actual structure of reality [Gelman] |
| 14192 | Essentialism must deal with charges of arbitrariness, and failure to reduce de re modality [Paul,LA] |
| 14197 | An object's modal properties don't determine its possibilities [Paul,LA] |
| 15147 | Cluster kinds are explained simply by sharing some properties, not by an 'essence' [Chakravartty] |
| 17876 | Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates [Almog] |