Summary |
Essentialists hold that at least a certain range of entities can be meaningfully said to have essences or natures independently of how these entities figure in our specifically human activities (e.g., linguistic, mental, social, conventional, explanatory, inferential or other practices). Anti-essentialists of various stripes (e.g., anti-realists, social constructivists, conventionalists, conferralists, pragmatists, etc.) deny that entities have essences in this sense. Commonly (at least in non-historical contexts) the essence/accident distinction is drawn in terms of a distinction between the essential and accidental properties of an entity; but the claim that essences should be thought of as properties or collections thereof is by no means uncontroversial. Following Aristotle, the essence/accident distinction is often characterized in terms of different types of changes that an entity could or could not survive, revealing simultaneously a connection between the notions of essence and substance: while entities can persist through non-substantial changes, i.e., changes with respect to their accidents, no entity can persist through a substantial change, i.e., a change with respect to its essence; a substantial change therefore is one in which an entity comes into or goes out of existence. Other (often related) characterizations of the essence/accident distinction also exist in the literature: for example, essences are linked with the classification of entities into kinds (especially natural kinds), persistence conditions, modal profiles, individuation, unity, as well as explanation and the formulation of general laws. Essences and conceptions of essence come in many different flavors: for example, we can distinguish between individual and kind essences; historical (genealogical, origin) essences and non-historical essences; as well as between intrinsic vs. relational/extrinsic essences. Modalists conceive of essences in modal terms, while non-modalists take facts about essences as basic and hold that necessity in some way “flows” from essence. While the exact nature of this alleged connection between non-modal essence and necessity still remains to be worked out, candidate proposals include appeals to logical consequence, metaphysical explanation (e.g., as associated with grounding or ontological dependence) or causation (e.g., formal causation). |