Abstract

Quine, the famous American empiricist philosopher, in wake of his criticisms of quantified modal logic, believes that the logic is committed to a doctrine which he calls Aristotelian Essentialism, and tries to prove that the doctrine is meaningless. He defines Aristotelian Essentialism as a doctrine which distinguishes between things’ essential and accidental properties, and the distinction is independent from the language in which the things are referred to, and also the ways by which they are specified. In the present paper, based on Aristotle's works, I have tried to find out whether Quine has defined the Aristotelian essentialism correctly, and whether his criticisms of essentialism include what Aristotle means by essentialism or not? I have argued that Quine has not analyzed Aristotelian essentialism correctly. Keywords: Essentialism, Modality, Aristotle, Quine.