Hybrid contingentism combines first-order contingentism, the view that it is contingent what individuals there are, with higher-order necessitism, the view that it is non-contingent what properties and propositions there are (where these are conceived as entities in the range of appropriate higher-order quantifiers). This combination of views avoids the most delicate problems afflicting alternative contingentist positions while preserving the central contingentist claim that ordinary, concrete entities exist contingently. Despite these attractive features, hybrid contingentism is usually faced with rejection. The main (...) reason for this is an objection that crucially involves haecceitistic properties, properties such as being identical to Plato or being identical to Aristotle. The objection alleges that by accepting the necessary existence of such haecceities, hybrid contingentists incur an explanatory commitment that they are unable to discharge, namely that of explaining how it is that certain haecceities ‘lock onto’ their target individuals even when those individuals are absent. To defend hybrid contingentism against this charge, I first clarify the haecceities objection in several respects and consider, in particular, what notion of explanation the objection is operating with. After arguing that it can be fruitfully understood as a challenge to provide metaphysical grounds for certain haecceity facts, I develop a contingentist response to the objection that draws on recent work on the connection between ground and essence. (shrink)

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-for-existence properties and individual essences. (shrink)

In Naming and Necessity, Kripke argues that intuitions about what is possible play a limited, but important, role in challenging philosophical theses, counting as evidence against them only if they cannot be reconstrued as intuitions about something else, compatible with the thesis in question. But he doesn't provide clear guidelines for determining when such intuitions have been successfully reconstrued, leading some to question their status as evidence for modal claims. In this paper I focus on some worries, articulated by Michael (...) Della Rocca, about whether modal intuitions can be evidence for claims about essential properties, and argue that there is a way of viewing the role of modal intuition in philosophical argument that can preserve their evidential force. (shrink)

I address two related questions: first, what is the best theory of how objects have de re modal properties? Second, what is the best defence of essentialism given the variability of our modal intuitions? I critically discuss several theories of how objects have their de re modal properties and address the most threatening antiessentialist objection to essentialism: the variability of our modal intuitions. Drawing on linguistic treatments of vagueness and ambiguity, I show how essentialists can accommodate the variability of modal (...) intuitions while holding that objects have their modal properties independently of contexts. (shrink)

In the last 30 years repeated attempts have been made to develop a proof-sketch Kripke gave for essentialism about material origins into a cogent argument. I argue that there are general reasons that all such attempts have failed, and so we should likewise expect future attempts to fail.

What would my life have been like if I had been born more intelligent? Or taller? Or a member of the opposite sex? Or a non-biological being? It is plausible that some of these questions make sense, while others stretch the limits of sense making. In addressing questions of how I might have been, genetic essentialism is popular, but this article argues that genetic essentialism, and other versions of origin essentialism for organisms, must be rejected. It considers the prospects for (...) counterpart theory and shows how counterpart theory can be used to illuminate volitional accounts of identity as proposed by Harry Frankfurt. This enables one to make sense of claims that, say, being gay, or Deaf, or Black, can be essential to someone's identity. The discussion is then extended to show how it can be made applicable to the transworld identity theorist who denies that individuals possess essential properties. (shrink)

In the last 30 years much philosophical discussion has been generated by Kripke’s proof of the necessity of origin for material objects presented in footnote 56 of ‘Naming and Necessity’. I consider the two most popular reconstructions of Kripke’s argument: one appealing to the necessary sufficiency of origin, and the other employing a strong independence principle allegedly derived from the necessary local nature of prevention. I argue that, to achieve a general result, both reconstructions presuppose an implicit Humean atomistic thesis (...) of recombination, according to which any two (non-overlapping) possible objects can simultaneously coexist in one and the same world. Yet recombination ill accords with the other assumptions of the proofs. I also argue that the locality of prevention does not entail strong independence. (shrink)