display all the ideas for this combination of texts
11 ideas
| 12252 | Empiricists gave up 'substance', as unknowable substratum, or reducible to a bundle [Oderberg] |
| Full Idea: The demise of 'substance' was wholly due to mistaken notions, mainly from the empiricists, by which it was conceived either as an unknowable featureless substratum, or as dispensable in favour of some or other bundle theory. | |
| From: David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be a view that the notion of substance is essential to explaining how we understand the world. I am inclined to think that if we accept the notion of essence we can totally dispense with the notion of substance. |
| 14542 | If statue and clay fall and crush someone, the event is not overdetermined [Mumford/Anjum] |
| Full Idea: If both the statue and the clay fall on someone and crush them to death, we would not say that the death is overdetermined. | |
| From: S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum (Getting Causes from Powers [2011], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: I don't need many reasons to give up the idea that the statue and the clay are two objects, but this will do nicely as one of them. |
| 14535 | Pandispositionalists say structures are clusters of causal powers [Mumford/Anjum] |
| Full Idea: A pandispositionalist has to defend the view that even a property such as sphericity is in reality a cluster of causal powers. | |
| From: S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum (Getting Causes from Powers [2011], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Is sphericity even a 'property'? I think 'feature' might be the best word for it. 'Quality' is quite good, but is too suggestive of qualia and secondary qualities. 'Mode' is not bad. Things have 'modes of existence' and 'powers'? Powers create modes. |
| 12241 | Essences are real, about being, knowable, definable and classifiable [Oderberg, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Real essences are objectively real, they concern being, they are knowable, they are definable, and they are classifiable. | |
| From: report of David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 1.4) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: This is a lovely summary (spread over two pages) of what essentialism is all about. It might be added that they are about unity and identity. The fact that they are intrinsically classifiable seems to mislead some people into a confused view. |
| 12244 | Nominalism is consistent with individual but not with universal essences [Oderberg] |
| Full Idea: Nominalism is consistent with belief in individual essences, but real essentialism postulates essences as universals (quiddities). Nominalists are nearly always empiricists, though the converse may not be the case. | |
| From: David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is where I part company with Oderberg. I want to argue that the nominalist/individualist view is more in tune with what Aristotle believed (though he spotted a dilemma here). Only individual essences explain individual behaviour. |
| 12240 | Essentialism is the main account of the unity of objects [Oderberg] |
| Full Idea: Real essentialism, more than any other ontological theory, stresses and seeks to explain the unity of objects. | |
| From: David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: A key piece in the jigsaw I am beginning to assemble. If explanation is the aim, and essence the key to explanation, then explaining unity is the part of it that connects with other metaphysics, about identity and so on. 'Units' breed numbers. |
| 12247 | Essence is not explanatory but constitutive [Oderberg] |
| Full Idea: Essence is not reducible to explanatory relations, ...and fundamentally the role of essence is not explanatory but constitutive. | |
| From: David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: Effectively, this asserts essence as part of 'pure' metaphysics, but I like impure metaphysics, as the best explanation of the things we can know. Hence we can speculate about constitution only by means of explanation. Constitution is active. |
| 12258 | Properties are not part of an essence, but they flow from it [Oderberg] |
| Full Idea: A substance is constituted by its essence, and properties are a species of accident. No property of a thing is part of a thing's essence, though properties flow from the essence. | |
| From: David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure I understand this. How can you know of something which has no properties? I'm wondering if the whole notion of a 'property' should be eliminated from good metaphysics. |
| 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. |
| 14561 | Perdurantism imposes no order on temporal parts, so sequences of events are contingent [Mumford/Anjum] |
| Full Idea: Perdurantism tends to go with the view that it is essentially contingent what follows what, because it is no part of the essence of temporal parts that they be arranged in any particular order. | |
| From: S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum (Getting Causes from Powers [2011], 5.5 1) | |
| A reaction: Nice. There is nothing illogical, then, in elderly me intervening between childish me and middle-aged me. Essentialists like me must clearly oppose this view. Elderly me must be preceded and caused by middle-aged me. |
| 12236 | Leibniz's Law is an essentialist truth [Oderberg] |
| Full Idea: Leibniz's Law is an essentialist truth. | |
| From: David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: That is, if two things must have identical properties because they are the same thing, this is because those properties are essential to the thing. Otherwise two things could be the same, even though one of them lacked a non-identifying property. |