Essential Properties and Individual Essences

Abstract

Abstract. According to Essentialism, an object's properties divide into those that are essential and those that are accidental. While being human is commonly thought to be essential to Socrates, being a philosopher plausibly is not. We can motivate the distinction by appealing-as we just did-to examples. However, it is not obvious how best to characterize the notion of essential property, nor is it easy to give conclusive arguments for the essentiality of a given property. In this paper, I elaborate on these issues and explore the way in which essential properties behave in relation to other related properties, like sufficient-forexistence properties and individual essences.

Quiddytyzm i quidditas w metafizyce analitycznej

“…W literaturze dotyczącej współczesnego esencjalizmu dominuje pogląd, zgodnie z którym indywidualne esencje niejakościowe należy utożsamić z cechą bycia identycznym z x-em bądź bycia x-em (Plantinga 1976, 1979, Rosenkrantz 1993, Roca-Royes 2011. Przenosząc to pojęcie na grunt I-quiddytyzmu, można stwierdzić, że quidditas własności F to cecha bycia własnością F bądź cecha bycia identycznym z własnością F. Dla przykładu, quidditas masy to własność bycia masą bądź bycia identycznym z masą.…”

Elucidating Divine Identity

“…Essentialism is roughly the metaphysical view that objects have essential and accidental properties. 17 Within an essentialist framework, philosophers generally hold to a certain range of entities being meaningfully said to have natures, essences and/or essential features, independently of how these entities are described or conceptualised. 18 The primary way in which essences (or natures) have been characterised, in contemporary work on essentialism within the field of analytic metaphysics, is through a modal characterisation.…”

On how (not) to define modality in terms of essence

“…6 Fine's counterexamples are widely accepted among philosophers interested in essence. Roca-Royes (2011), p. 66 for example observes about the fourth counterexample that 'virtually everyone' working on the topic accepts Fine's claim that objects are not essentially elements of their singleton set. 7 Based on his objections to the modal definition of essential properties, Fine suggests that instead of 'viewing essence as a special case of metaphysical necessity, we should view metaphysical necessity as a special case of essence,' (Fine (1994), p.…”