Explaining essences

A Puzzle for Social Essences

“…Some of their fruitfulness derives from the fruitful roles essences play in general. One of these roles is fixing the domain (Raven 2021b). When speaking of a chemical kind (gold), a species (tigers), or a person (Saul Kripke), we might ask what it is we speak of.…”

“…Perhaps there is a way to accommodate the domain-fixing conception within the Aristotelian tradition. But it is not altogether clear how this might be done (Raven 2021b). So the unworldliness of essentialist facts might seem to be an inevitable consequence of the domain-fixing conception.…”

“…In particular, we will want fuller accounts of the proximal unworldliness of essentialist facts and of the distal worldliness of social-essentialist facts. And it may be challenging to provide such accounts (Raven 2021b). But now at least there is a path laid out before us toward a solution to the puzzle.…”

Essence

“…7 A different way of reconstructing that debate appeals to Kit Fine's (2005) distinction between "worldly" and "transcendent" facts. This line of inquiry has recently been pursued in a series of very interesting papers by Mike Raven (2020aRaven ( , 2021Raven ( , 2022. Although I have taken a different Essence this investigation are then brought to bear on our question in Section 3, which sketches an argument from the premise that essentialist facts are explained by the origins of things to the conclusion that such facts are active.…”

Chains of being: Infinite regress, circularity, and metaphysical explanationRoss P.CameronOxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. ix + 252.

“…Cameron does not, however, offer much justification for his take on the explanatory structure of the world. And this lack of justification is especially surprising given the recent resurgence of interest in the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) within the grounding literature (Dasgupta 2016; Raven 2021; Amijee 2021). The proponent of the PSR, formulated as “All facts have grounds,” for example, will insist that there is an objective explanatory structure to the world, one that constrains our metaphysical theorizing.…”