The essence of the Man self-reflection has discovered Materialistic monism with understanding of substance as the reality of all existed, including universal: qualities – continuity, interruptness, corpuscleness, reflection; characteristics – transition from quantity to quality and vice versa, unity and struggle of opposites, denial of denial, unity of substance; states – rest, development, form, motion; processes – physical, chemical, biological, mental. The Materialistic monism consists of the unity of methodological, theoretical, sociological, statistical and practical levels of cognition, mastered by (...) the Man through five known historical ways of the vital activity. Each successive historical period of life is characterized by more perfect forms of the Man bodiness, his common character and relationships, subject interaction, reflection and consciousness, and hence by it considerable broadening of the boarders of cognition and its set of instruments.Philosophical significance of the levels of cognition consists in their possibility to consider a phenomenon as universal, general, particular, separate and single; stratificated methods of cognition and technologies of penetration into different aspects of the phenomenon essence. The methodological cognition with itsown distinctive methods contains all other methods, thus this unity pretends to be the Modern Philosophy, including monistic, systemic, dialectial, metaphisical and empirical methods of cognition. (shrink)

God as the universal reflection of Human essence has discovered Materialistic monism with understanding of substance as the reality of all existed, including universal: qualities – continuity, interruptness, corpuscleness, reflection; characteristics – transition from quantity to quality and vice versa, unity and struggle of opposites, denial of denial, unity of substance; states – rest, development, form, motion; processes – physical, chemical, biological, mental, where Man and God are united. The Materialistic consists of the unity of methodological, theoretical, sociological, statistical (...) and practical levels of cognition, mastered by the Man through five known historical ways of the vital activity. Each successive historical period of life is characterized by more perfect forms of the Man bodiness, his common character and relationships, subject interaction, reflection and consciousness, and hence by it considerable broadening of the boarders of cognition and its set of instruments. Philosophical significance of the levels of cognition consists in their possibility to consider a phenomenon as universal, general, particular,separate and single; stratificated methods of cognition and technologies of penetration into different aspects of the phenomenon essence. The methodological cognition with its own distinctive methods contains all other methods, thus unity pretends to be the Modern Philosophy, including monistic, systemic, dialectial, metaphisical and empirical methods of cognition, where there is no contradiction of Science and Religion. (shrink)

The Essence of Human Freedom is a fundamental text for understanding Heidegger's view of Greek philosophy and its relationship to modern philosophy.

It is my aim in this paper to show that the contemporary assimilation of essence to modality is fundamentally misguided and that, as a consequence, the corresponding conception of metaphysics should be given up. It is not my view that the modal account fails to capture anything which might reasonably be called a concept of essence. My point, rather, is that the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity is not to (...) be understood in modal terms or even to be regarded as extensionally equivalent to a modal notion. The one notion is, if I am right, a highly refined version of the other; it is like a sieve which performs a similar function but with a much finer mesh. (shrink)

Classic of Russian philosophy Alexandr I. Vvedensky proposed a definition of metaphysics as a study of true reality contrary to apparent one. This definition seems to be useful in contemporary issues. It's an apt definition because it describes an ancient metaphysics as good as classical tradition and concerns all branches of the philosophical knowledge. A number of philosophical subjects are connected with the difference of true and apparent reality as their foundation. For instance, Philosophical Anthropology differentiates between real and formal (...) personal existence. Epistemology discusses a problem of a criterion of real existence and notes that any language does not contain such internal criterion. The Philosophy of science analyses a conventional reality created by people, and so does the Philosophy of art. Social and Political Philosophy due to understand a nature of special phenomena which have no substance but are real and objective. Finally, contemporary Philosophy of technology concentrates on the virtual reality as a special kind of existence. So, the problem of the distinction between true and apparent reality manifests itself in all philosophical disciplines, and this fact determines a major meaning of the metaphysics in the philosophy. (shrink)

Some essence facts have metaphysical explanations. Some metaphysical explanations for essence facts consist in nonessential facts.

This paper reviews the concept of ‘essence’ in Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas as found presented by Edith Stein in her Festschrift article, ‘Husserl’s Phenomenology and the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas: Attempt at a Comparison,’ in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (1929, 370). The aim of the paper is to perform an analysis of Stein’s understanding of the principal similarities and differences in the understandings of essence found in the writings of Husserl and Aquinas, and (...) primarily in terms of the immediacy of the intuition or cognition of essences. I begin by a basic analysis of this commonality and difference with a focus on the interweaving of the following themes: essence and existence; essence and sensual knowledge; essence and its objective ground; essence as intuited, as actively acquired and as passively received; insight into essence, immediate and mediate knowledge. Despite certain misunderstanding arising between the phenomenological movement and the scholastic tradition in this sphere, Stein recognises a number of points of agreement, namely, 1) the beginnings of all knowledge in sense experience, 2) the intellectual ‘work’ (erarbeiten) that is required to achieve a clear vision of essences, and 3) the finally passive nature of the act of understanding. I critically analyse each of these enumerated points of agreement towards clarifying how Stein conceives of the possibility of using the phenomenological method for achieving an understanding of essences coherent with a Thomistic metaphysical worldview, and how she parses and explains the further disagreements over the question of the mediacy or immediacy of human knowledge of essences of different kinds. (shrink)

The notion of essence in psychology is examined from a constructivist viewpoint. The constructivist position is summarized and differentiated from social constructionism, after which constructs are distinguished from concepts in order to position ontology and epistemology as modes of construing. After situating constructivism in relation to philosophical approaches to essences, the distinction between essences and kinds is examined and the presumed constructivist critique of essences in psychology outlined. It is argued that criticizing constructivism as an “anything goes” form of (...) antirealism fails to grasp how constructivist psychology, by emphasizing structure and viability, does indeed place limits on the constructions people may hold. In applying a constructivist understanding of essences in general to those fundamental to human psychology, people can be seen as having three essential psychological qualities: they are closed systems, active meaning-makers, and irreducibly social beings. Yet a constructivist view also maintains that these psychological essences only hold while operating within and committed to a constructivist perspective. In other words, what counts as an essence always depends on one's assumptions, or how one construes events. Finally, a personal construct theory model of essentialist and nonessentialist construing is introduced based on the assumption that everyone construes in both essentialist and nonessentialist ways at different times because doing so is pragmatically viable. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Alan Sidelle's Necessity, Essence, and Individuation is a sustained defense of empiricism—or, more generally, conventionalism—against recent attacks by realists. Sidelle focuses his attention on necessity a posteriori, a kind of necessity which contemporary realists have taken to support realism over empiricism. Turning the tables against the realists, Sidelle argues that if there are in fact truths necessary a posteriori, it is not realism, but rather empiricism which provides the best explanation for them.

Michael and has argued that species have intrinsic essences. This paper rebuts Devitt’s arguments, but in so doing it shores up the anti-essentialist consensus in two ways that have more general interest. First, species membership can be explanatory even when species have no essences; that is, Tamsin’s membership of the tiger species can explain her stripyness, without this committing us to any further claim about essential properties of tigers. Second, even the views of species that appear most congenial to essentialism—namely (...) phenetic and genotypic cluster accounts—do not entail strong forms of intrinsic essentialism. (shrink)

In a recent article forthcoming in *Mind*, Leech (2020) presents a challenge for essentialist accounts of metaphysical modality: why should it be that essences imply corresponding necessities? Leech’s main focus is to argue that one cannot overcome the challenge by utilizing an account of essence in terms of generalized identity due to Correia and Skiles (2019), on pain of circularity. In this reply, we will show how to use identity-based essentialism to bridge ‘epistemic’ and ‘explanatory’ understandings of this alleged (...) essence-to-necessity gap without circularity, Leech’s arguments notwithstanding. We do so by first presenting a novel proof that generalized identities imply corresponding necessities. We then propose several substantive identity-based explanations of how it is, exactly, that essences imply necessities. -/- . (shrink)

When thinking about the notion of essence or of an essential feature, philosophers typically focus on what I will call the notion of objectual essence. The main aim of this paper is to argue that beside this familiar notion stands another one, the notion of generic essence, which contrary to appearance cannot be understood in terms of the familiar notion, and which also fails to be correctly characterized by certain other accounts which naturally come to mind as (...) well. Some of my objections to these accounts are similar to some of Kit Fine’s compelling objections to the standard modal account of (objectual) essence (Fine 1994). In the light of these objections, Fine advances the view that it is metaphysical necessity which has to be understood in terms of essence, rather than the other way around, and takes essence to be unanalyzable. When formulatinghis view, Fine had only objectual essence in mind (or had both concepts in mind, but assumed that the generic is a special case of the objectual), and for that reason, I will argue, his account fails. I will suggest that Fineans should modify their view, and take it that metaphysical necessity is to be understood in terms of the two notions of essence—a view I myself find appealing. Finally, I will end by suggesting a further move which reduces the objectual to the generic, making metaphysical necessity reducible to generic essence alone—a move with which I myself have some sympathy. (shrink)

In the first half of this paper, I argue that essential properties are intrinsic and that this permits a modal analysis of essence that is immune the sort of objections raised by Fine. In the second half, I argue that intrinsic properties collectively have a certain structure and that this accounts for some observations about essences: that things are essentially determinate; that things often have properties within a certain range essentially; and that the essential properties of things are their (...) core properties. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects of combining two views. The first view is metaphysical rationalism : all things have an explanation. The second view is metaphysical essentialism: there are real essences. The exploration is motivated by a conflict between the views. Metaphysical essentialism posits facts about essences. Metaphysical rationalism demands explanations for all facts. But facts about essences appear to resist explanation. I consider two solutions to the conflict. Exemption solutions attempt to exempt facts about essences from the demand for (...) explanation. Explanation solutions attempt to explain facts about essences. I argue that exemption solutions are less promising than explanation solutions. I then consider how explanation solutions might be developed. I suggest that a “generative” approach is most promising. I tentatively conclude that the prospects for combining metaphysical rationalism and metaphysical essentialism turn on the viability of a generative approach. This sets the agenda for defending the combination as well as the more general project of explaining essences. (shrink)

It is common to think of essence along modal lines: the essential truths, on this approach, are a subset of the necessary truths. But Aristotle conceives of the necessary truths as being distinct and derivative from the essential truths. Such a non-modal conception of essence also constitutes a central component of the neo-Aristotelian approach to metaphysics defended over the last several decades by Kit Fine. Both Aristotle and Fine rely on a distinction between what belongs to the (...) class='Hi'>essence proper of an object and what merely follows from the essence proper of an object. In order for this type of approach to essence and modality to be successful, we must be able to identify an appropriate consequence relation which in fact generates the result that the necessary truths about objects follow from the essential truths. I discuss some proposals put forward by Fine and then turn to Aristotle’s account: Aristotle’s central idea, to trace the explanatory power of definitions to the causal power of essences has the potential to open the door to a philosophically satisfying response to the question of why certain things are relevant, while others are irrelevant, to the nature or essence of entities. If at all possible, it would be desirable for example to have something further to say by way of explanation to such questions as ‘Why is the number 2 completely irrelevant to the nature of camels?’. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Essence and Explanation in Theory and Practice Form, Function, and Biological Essentialism The Priority of Being to Generation Conclusion Notes Bibliography.

Fine is widely thought to have refuted the simple modal account of essence, which takes the essential properties of a thing to be those it cannot exist without exemplifying. Yet, a number of philosophers have suggested resuscitating the simple modal account by appealing to distinctions akin to the distinction Lewis draws between sparse and abundant properties, treating only those in the former class as candidates for essentiality. I argue that ‘sparse modalism’ succumbs to counterexamples similar to those originally posed (...) by Fine, and fails to capture paradigmatic instances of essence involving abundant properties and relations. (shrink)

What is the relation between metaphysical necessity and essence? This paper defends the view that the relation is one of identity: metaphysical necessity is a special case of essence. My argument consists in showing that the best joint theory of essence and metaphysical necessity is one in which metaphysical necessity is just a special case of essence. The argument is made against the backdrop of a novel, higher-order logic of essence, whose core features are introduced (...) in the first part of the paper. The second part investigates the relation between metaphysical necessity and essence in the context of HLE. Reductive hypotheses are among the most natural hypotheses to be explored in the context of HLE. But they also have to be weighed against their non-reductive rivals. I investigate three different reductive hypotheses and argue that two of them fare better than their non-reductive rivals: they are simpler, more natural, and more systematic. Specifically, I argue that one candidate reduction, according to which metaphysical necessity is truth in virtue of the nature of all propositions, is superior to the others, including one proposed by Kit Fine, according to which metaphysical necessity is truth in virtue of the nature of all objects. The paper concludes by offering some reasons to think that the best joint theory of essence and metaphysical necessity is one in which the logic of metaphysical necessity includes S4, but not S5. (shrink)

Dispositional essentialists argue that physical properties have their causal roles essentially. This is typically taken to mean that physical properties are identical to dispositions. I argue that this is untenable, and that we must instead say that properties bestow dispositions. I explore what it is for a property to have such a role essentially. Dispositional essentialists argue for their view by citing certain epistemological and metaphysical implications, and I appeal to these implications to place desiderata on the concept of (...) class='Hi'>essence involved. I argue that the traditional modal theory of essence meets these desiderata, but that the resulting theory wrongly implies that certain dispositions essential to mass are essential to charge, thereby offering a new argument against modal theories of essence. I argue that dispositional essentialism requires a primitive notion of essence, and develop a primitivist theory based on Kit Fine's views. I show that the primitivist theory has all the virtues of the modal alternative, and none of the vices. I develop a novel way of thinking about the relationship between properties, laws and dispositions, and argue that it has distinct advantages over standard dispositional essentialist formulations. (shrink)

What is business ethics? How can we mediate between private interests and moral demands? What are the moral core responsibilities in quality management? What is enlightened egoism and why is it one of the best ethical theories for business? The Essence of Business Ethics is an invaluable reference source for MBA students and managers, whether on a short course or as a reference work for the bookshelf. It is intended to focus upon the core of the subject and is (...) an ideal summary for undergraduates, postgraduates, other students and aspiring managers wishing to improve their knowledge and skills. (shrink)

According to sparse modalism, the notion of essence can be analysed in terms of necessity and naturalness. In this paper, I develop and defend a version of sparse modalism that is equipped with a non-standard, relativized conception of naturalness. According to this conception, properties and relations can be natural to different degrees relative to different kinds of things, and relations can be natural to different degrees relative to different slots. I argue that this relativized version of sparse modalism can (...) accommodate various cases that the standard, non-relativized version can’t. The alternative version can accommodate cases where a relation is essential to a relatum but merely necessary to another, cases where a property is essential to an object but merely necessary to another, and cases where a less-than-perfectly natural property is essential to an object. (shrink)

Kit Fine famously objected against the idea that essence can be successfully analyzed in terms of de re necessity. In response, I want to explore a novel, interesting, but controversial modal account of essence in terms of intrinsicality and grounding. In the first section, I will single out two theoretical requirements that any essentialist theory should meet—the essentialist desideratum and the essentialist challenge—in order to clarify Fine’s objections. In the second section, I will assess Denby’s improved modal account, (...) which appeals to the notion of intrinsicality, and argue that it is untenable. In the third section, I will explain how, when combined with a modal-existential criterion, a hyperintensional account of intrinsicality—in the same vein as Bader (J Philos 110(10): 525–563, 2013) and Rosen (in: Hale and Hoffman (eds) Modality: Metaphysics, logic, and epistemology, Oxford, OUP, 2010)—can help successfully address Fine’s counterexamples. In the fourth section, I will evaluate how this novel analysis of essence stands with respect to sortal, origin, and natural kinds essentialism and discuss potential objections and difficulties. (shrink)

The concept of essence is thought by many political theorists to be a residue of the patriarchal onto-theological tradition of metaphysics that needs to be (or has been) overcome by more progressive aims. The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of essentialism in light of the treatment of the concept of essence in Hegel’s Science of Logic, and within the context of recent issues in critical race theory and feminism. I will argue that the role (...) of an essence underlying appearance is a valuable one within a Hegelian framework, and that it is politically important to reassess it. There are reasons that we should want to uphold the distinction between essence and an inessential appearance. We should want to uphold the irreducibility of essence to the Hegelian self-determining concept, and I argue in this paper that there is a basis for doing so in Hegel’s own text. Despite the well established impossibility of claiming that there is a property or set of properties that all women share, to dissolve essence as an illusory side-effect of the show of appearance is both to misunderstand essence, and to relinquish a tool needed in the struggle for justice. Essence cannot be dismissed by claiming that it is an illusory side-effect of the show of appearance because essence and the inessential do not exhibit the characteristic of reciprocity. (shrink)

Recent metaphysics has turned its focus to two notions that are—as well as having a common Aristotelian pedigree—widely thought to be intimately related: grounding and essence. Yet how, exactly, the two are related remains opaque. We develop a unified and uniform account of grounding and essence, one which understands them both in terms of a generalized notion of identity examined in recent work by Fabrice Correia, Cian Dorr, Agustín Rayo, and others. We argue that the account comports with (...) antecedently plausible principles governing grounding, essence, and identity taken individually, and illuminates how the three interact. We also argue that the account compares favorably to an alternative unification of grounding and essence recently proposed by Kit Fine. (shrink)

Aristotle frequently describes essence as a “cause” or “explanation”, thus ascribing to essence some sort of causal or explanatory role. This explanatory role is often explicated by scholars in terms of essence “making the thing be what it is” or “making it the very thing that it is”. I argue that this is problematic, at least on the assumption that “making” expresses an explanatory relation, since it violates certain formal features of explanation. I then consider whether Aristotle (...) is vulnerable to this problem by examining the explanatory role of essence in Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics Z 17. (shrink)

This paper evaluates six contenders which might be invoked by essentialists in order to meet Quine’s challenge, viz., to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the crossworld identity of individuals: (i) an object’s qualitative character; (ii) matter; (iii) origins; (iv) haecceities or primitive non-qualitative thisness properties; (v) “world-indexed properties”; and (iv) individual forms. The first three candidates, I argue, fail to provide conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for the crossworld identity of individuals; the fourth and fifth criteria are (...) open to the charge that they do not succeed in meeting Quine’s demand in an explanatorily adequate fashion. On balance, then, individual forms, or so I propose, deserve to be taken very seriously as a possible response to Quine’s challenge, especially by neo-Aristotelians who are already committed to a hylomorphic conception of composite concrete particular objects for other reasons. Theorists who also accept a non-modal conception of essence, i.e., a conception according to which essence is not reducible to modality, in addition face the further difficult task, over and above what is required to meet Quine’s challenge, of having to explain how an object’s de re modal profile in some way follows from facts about its essence. Haecceities and world-indexed properties, as I indicate, are unlikely to be of much help with respect to this second challenge, while the forms of hylomorphic compounds are in fact well-suited for this purpose. (shrink)

Discussions about the nature of essence and about the inference problem for non-Humean theories of nomic modality have largely proceeded independently of each other. In this article I argue that the right conclusions to draw about the inference problem actually depend significantly on how best to understand the nature of essence. In particular, I argue that this conclusion holds for the version of the inference problem developed and defended by Alexander Bird. I argue that Bird’s own argument that (...) this problem is fatal for David Armstrong’s influential theory of the laws of nature but not for dispositional essentialism is seriously flawed. In place of this argument, I develop an argument that whether Bird’s inference problem raises serious difficulties for Armstrong’s theory depends on the answers to substantial questions about how best to understand essence. The key consequence is that considerations about the nature of essence have significant, underappreciated implications for Armstrong’s theory. (shrink)

Definition: An essence is a meaning, a structure, the character, the nature of an entity, "what" it is.

" Le séminaire "L'essence de la politique" appartient au cycle qui étudie les quatre procédures de vérité (science, art, amour, politique) dans leur être de condition de la philosophie. Le coeur de l'entreprise a cette fois été de démontrer un théorème spéculatif difficile, dont je donne, près de trente ans plus tard, une version synthétique : La politique est la pensée, ou la théorie, de ce qu'elle est, y compris si on l'entend comme "pratique", comme action transformatrice de l'humanité (...) par elle-même. Mais une définition de la politique, qui en expose l'Idée éternelle, est toujours de nature philosophique. Il en résulte que toute confusion entre la pensée politique comme telle, agissant en situation, et sa définition philosophique, tournée vers l'éternité, prépare un désastre. Ces pages confrontent en moi-même, et dans leur tension toujours portée à l'irrésolution, le militant et le philosophe. Que le lecteur injecte dans ce support ses propres impasses... " A. B. Depuis 1966, une part importante de l'enseignement du philosophe Alain Badiou a pris la forme d'un séminaire, lieu de libre parole et laboratoire de pensée. Les éditions Fayard publient l'ensemble de ces Séminaires de 1983 à aujourd'hui, période où la documentation est abondante et continue. Ce volume est le douzième de la série. (shrink)

Inquiry into the metaphysics of essence tends to be pursued in a realist and model-theoretic spirit, in the sense that metaphysical vocabulary is used in a metalanguage to model truth conditions for the object-language use of essentialist vocabulary. This essay adapts recent developments in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a nominalist analysis for a variety of essentialist vocabularies. A metalanguage employing explanatory inferences is used to individuate introduction and elimination rules for atomic sentences. The object-language assertions of sentences concerning essences (...) are then interpreted as devices for marking off structural features of the explanatory inferences that, under a given interpretation, constitute the contents of the atoms of the language. On this proposal, object-language essentialist vocabulary is mentioned in a proof-theoretic metalanguage that uses a vocabulary of explanation. The result is a nominalist interpretation of essence as a modality, understood in the grammatical sense as a modification of the copula, and a view of metaphysical inquiry that is closely connected to the explanatory commitments present in first-order inquiry into things like sets, chemicals, and organisms. This result illustrates that some of the presuppositions that have animated analytic metaphysics over the last few decades can be profitably substituted with more practice-oriented conceptions of the forms of reasoning at work in different domains of human knowledge. (shrink)

I first discuss Kit Fine's distinctive 'schema-based' approach to metaphysical theorizing, which aims to identify general principles accommodating any intelligible application of the notion(s), by attention to his accounts of essence and dependence. I then raise some specific concerns about the general principles Fine takes to schematically characterize these notions. In particular, I present various counterexamples to Fine's essence-based account of ontological dependence. The problem, roughly speaking, is that Fine supposes that an object's essence makes reference to (...) just what it ontologically depends on, but various cases suggest that an object's essence can also make reference to what ontologically depends on it. As such, Fine's account of ontological dependence is subject to the same objection he raises against modal accounts of essence and dependence---that is, of being insufficiently ecumenical. (shrink)

Since Kit Fine presented his counter-examples to the standard versions of the modal view, many have been convinced that the standard versions of the modal view are not adequate. However, the scope of Fine's argument has not been fully appreciated. In this paper, I aim to carry Fine’s argument to its logical conclusion and argue that once we embrace the intuition underlying his counter-examples, we have to hold that properties obtained, totally or partially, by application of logical operations are not (...) essential to non-logical entities. I also demonstrate that most of the post-Finean versions of the modal view, which were developed to accommodate Fine’s counter-examples, entail that such properties are essential to the entities, and so fail to capture the notion of essence at issue in Fine's counter-examples. Additionally, I explore the consequence of my argument for Fine’s proposed logic of essence. The logic turns out to be inadequate in its present shape as it represents such properties to be essential to the entities. I conclude by developing a modification to the logic to overcome the shortcoming. (shrink)

Since Kit Fine published his famous counter-examples to the modal account of essence, numerous modalists have proposed to avoid the counter-examples by revising the modal account. A sophisticated revision has been put forward by Fabrice Correia. Drawing on themes from Prior’s modality, Correia has introduced a nonstandard conception of metaphysical modality and has proposed to analyze essence in its terms. He has claimed that the analysis is immune to Fine’s counter-examples. In this paper, I argue that there are (...) counter-examples supported by the very intuition underlying Fine’s counter-examples, which are not accommodated by Correia’s account. If my argument is sound, then Correia has not been successful in his defense of modalism. An important corollary of my argument will be that Fine’s consequential conception of essence needs to be modified if it is to capture his own intuitive notion of essence. (shrink)

Psychologists have long debated the underlying cause of infants' perseverative reaching. Thelen et al. explain the error in terms of general processes that make goal-directed actions to remembered locations. The context- and experience-dependent nature of their model implies that there is no single cause of the A-not-B error, and, more generally, no core essence to cognitive development.

Despite its appeal and popularity, the view that membership in a natural kind is essential to an individual is unsupported by the logic of essences and has no compelling reflective support. While the view has strong intuitive and empirical support this is insufficient to establish it. There are advantages to abandoning the view that kind membership is essential to individuals. One of these advantages is that it allows for a reconfiguring of the problem of material constitution in a way that (...) removes much of the paradox. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur was one of the outstanding French philosophers of the 20th century and his work is widely read in the English-speaking world. This unique volume comprises the lectures that Ricoeur gave on Plato and Aristotle at the University of Strasbourg in 1953-54. The aim of these lectures is to analyse the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and to discern in their work the ontological foundations of Western philosophy. The relation between Plato and Aristotle is commonly portrayed as a contrast (...) between a philosophy of essence and a philosophy of substance, but Ricoeur shows that this opposition is too simple. Aristotelian ontology is not a simple antithesis to Platonism: the radical ontology of Aristotle stands in a far more subtle relation of continuity and opposition to that of Plato and it is this relation we have to reconstruct and understand. Ricoeur’s lectures offer a brilliant analysis of the great works of Plato and Aristotle which has withstood the test of time. They also provide a unique insight into the development of Ricoeur’s thinking in the early 1950s, revealing that, even at this early stage of his work, Ricoeur was focused sharply on issues of language and the text. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss the need for a theory of essences within Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and then formulate one. I will do so by drawing on Graham Harman’s work on OOO and Martin Heidegger’s thought on the essence of being, presented in his Introduction to Metaphysics. Harman touches on essences, describing them as the tension between a withdrawn object and its withdrawn qualities, but fails to distinguish between essential and inessential qualities within this framework. To fill in (...) the gaps, I will turn to Heidegger’s explication of phusis in order to show that an essential aspect of being is how one enters into causal relations and continually reveals oneself to other beings. In bringing OOO and Heidegger together, I will find that each object has a unique way of exerting itself in the world and that the domestic relations that make up this unique profile are essential to it, while other domestic relations, those that do not influence its particular way of exerting itself, are inessential. Thus, the essence will be found to be the set of domestic relations that make up the determinate form, or unique causal profile, of the object. (shrink)

I first discuss Kit Fine's distinctive 'schema-based' approach to metaphysical theorizing, which aims to identify general principles accommodating any intelligible application of the notion, by attention to his accounts of essence and dependence. I then raise some specific concerns about the general principles Fine takes to schematically characterize these notions. In particular, I present various counterexamples to Fine's essence -based account of ontological dependence. The problem, roughly speaking, is that Fine supposes that an object's essence makes reference (...) to just what it ontologically depends on, but various cases suggest that an object's essence can also make reference to what ontologically depends on it, either by way of composition or causation. As such, Fine's account of ontological dependence is subject to the same objection he raises against modal accounts of essence and dependence---that is, of being insufficiently ecumenical. (shrink)

" L'essence du christianisme a frappé d'un " coup de tonnerre " philosophique le monde des intellectuels révolutionnaires " jeunes-hégéliens " allemands : " Nous fûmes tous feuerbachiens " (Engels). L'intervention de Feuerbach marque un tournant décisif dans la formation de la pensée de Marx. Marx a " épousé " la pensée de Feuerbach pendant des années. Il a dû passer par Feuerbach pour devenir Marx. Il est devenu Marx en se séparant de Feuerbach. L'essence du christianisme n'a (...) rien perdu de sa force révélatrice. Les philosophes seront frappés de découvrir dans ce livre des problèmes, des principes, de formules et des catégories philosophiques qui sont au cœur même de la pensée contemporaine. L'essence du christianisme a été le miroir et la solution provisoire de la crise des philosophes jeunes-hégéliens dans les années 1841-1845. On constatera avec quelle étonnante profondeur Feuerbach annone et devance, à un titre ou un autre, par contraste ou parenté, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, certains thèmes de Heidegger, Barth et la théologie récente, etc. L'essence du christianisme est, aujourd'hui encore, un ouvrage scandaleux. Car il porte sur la religion chrétienne et divise les hommes. Il oblige à se prononcer sur ce qui est sans doute la question cruciale de la philosophie contemporaine : religieuse, OU pour une philosophie consciemment et rigoureusement antireligieuse. ". (shrink)

Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the woman pioneer of the realistic phenomenological school, describes the reality to which her philosophizing is addressed as “totally non-material corporeality”. With this contradictory expression she seeks to affirm two foundational aspects regarding reality: the spatial that achieved material realization in real existents and the concealed non-spatial that is at the cradle of the establishing of reality and remains present behind its phenomenal and material appearing. This article focuses on three ontological elements in HCM’s idea of reality—“essence”, (...) “abyss”, and “self”—whose meaning both implies and raises the issue of the non-spatiality of Being in a complex manner. Moreover, the three seek the same objective of coming to terms with the force in real beings that will never ever be able to shine in its entirety. By means of philosophical explication of the mentioned elements and the illumination of the dialectic of each of them with the corresponding spatial aspects, this article demonstrates the evolution of HCM's understanding of the issue of spatiality that mirrors her metaphysics as a whole. (shrink)

Kit Fine and Gideon Rosen propose to define constitutive essence in terms of ground-theoretic notions and some form of consequential essence. But we think that the Fine–Rosen proposal is a mistake. On the Fine–Rosen proposal, constitutive essence ends up including properties that, on the central notion of essence (what Fine calls ‘the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity’), are necessary but not essential. This is because consequential essence (...) is (roughly) closed under logical consequence, and the ability of logical consequence to add properties to an object’s consequential essence outstrips the ability of ground-theoretic notions, as used in the Fine–Rosen proposal, to take those properties out. The necessary-but-not-essential properties that, on the Fine–Rosen proposal, end up in constitutive essence include the sorts of necessary-but-not-essential properties that, others have noted, end up in consequential essence. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that entities have essences. What are we to make of the view that essences are themselves entities? E.J. Lowe has put forward an infinite regress argument against it. In this paper I challenge that argument. First, drawing on work by J.W. Wieland, I give a general condition for the obtaining of a vicious infinite regress. I then argue that in Lowe’s case the condition is not met. In making my case, I mainly (but not exclusively) consider definitionalist (...) accounts of essence. I make a re￾quirement to which definitionalists such as Lowe are committed and which, I venture, should also be palatable to non-naïve modalists. I call it the Relevance Principle. The defence trades on it, as well as on the distinction, due to K. Fine, between mediate and immediate essence. (shrink)

Axios's Essence of... Series takes the greatest works of practical philosophy and pares them down to their essence. Selected passages flow together to create a seamless work that will capture your interest from page one. This newest volume in the series is dedicated to David Hume who is ranked as one of the greatest Western philosophers and economists. You will find three main sections on Hume (Religion, Morals, and Economics) as well as a section on his life.

This paper examines the problem of natural kinds, a key problem within feminist theory, and argues for a non-instrumental realist account of group identity. I suggest that a reconstructed theory of essence helps to make sense of group membership because it combines a conventional account of groups with a realist commitment to there being something responsible for the appearance of regularities in the world. The claim that natural kind membership is a matter of similarity relationships manages to avoid metaphysical, (...) universal property-based essentialism and, at the same time, points to interested generative mechanisms underlying the appearance of the regularities that make sense of kind membership. Finally, I suggest that the concepts 'real essence' and 'internal constitution' offer a new way to conceive 'sex' and 'gender', and that Adorno's notion of non-identity is a way to think group membership non-instrumentally. (shrink)

In a recent paper Copi has argued for the admission of the term “essence” into scientific terminology. His primary reason is that the increasing adequacy of scientific theories is evidence of a gradual approximation to the real essences of things. Copi is aware that the laws of modern science are not to be taken as formulations of essences. But, he claims, “that is an ideal towards which science strives… Centuries hence wiser men will have radically different and more adequate (...) theories, and their notions will be closer approximations than ours to the real essences of things.”. (shrink)