Table Of Content

Real Essentialism Real Essentialism defends the metaphysical position that everything in the world has an essence or nature that fixes its identity. Although atraditional view in philosophy, defended most famously by Aristotle, scepticism about and hostility to the notion of essence in modern and contemporary philo- sophyareacommonplace.Recentworkinlogicandphilosophyoflanguage has given essentialism a new life, but Real Essentialism argues that it has still not been given the contemporary defence it requires. It sets out a full theory of essence and applies it to such questions as the nature of species, the nature of life and the essence of the person. David S. Oderberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. Hehaspublishedmanybooksandarticlesinmetaphysics,philosophicallogic, ethics, philosophy of religion, and other subjects. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy 1. Email and Ethics Style and Ethical Relations in Computer-Mediated Communication Emma Rooksby 2. Causation and Laws of Nature Max Kistler 3. Internalism and Epistemology The Architecture of Reason Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew 4. Einstein, Relativityand Absolute Simultaneity Edited by William Lane Craigand Quentin Smith 5. Epistemology Modalized Kelly Becker 6. Truth and Speech Acts Studies in the philosophyof language Edited by Dirk Greimann and Geo Siegwart 7. Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge A Sense of the World Edited by John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci 8. A Pragmatist Philosophyof Democracy Communities of Inquiry Robert B. Talisse 9. Aesthetics and Material Beauty Aesthetics Naturalized Jennifer A. McMahon 10. Aesthetic Experience Edited by Richard Shusterman and Adele Tomlin 11. Real Essentialism David S. Oderberg 12. To be announced 13. Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy Heather Dyke 14. Practical Identityand Narrative Agency Edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Kim Atkins Real Essentialism David S. Oderberg Firstpublished2007 byRoutledge 270MadisonAvenue,NewYork,NY10016 SimultaneouslypublishedintheUK byRoutledge 2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business #2007DavidS.Oderberg TypesetinTimesNewRomanby Taylor&FrancisBooks PrintedandboundinGreatBritainby TJInternationalLtd,Padstow,Cornwall Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproduced orutilizedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanicalorothermeans, nowknownorhereafterinvented,includingphotocopyingandrecording, orinanyinformationstorageorretrievalsystem,withoutpermissionin writingfromthepublishers. LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData Oderberg,DavidS. Realessentialism/DavidS.Oderberg. p.cm.– (Routledgestudiesincontemporaryphilosophy;11) Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex. 1. Essentialism(Philosophy) I.Title.II.Series. B105.E65O432007 111’.1–dc22 2007010357 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-35675-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN13: 978-0-415-32364-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-35675-3 (ebk) Contents List of illustrations ix Preface x Acknowledgements xiii 1 Contemporary essentialism and real essentialism 1 1.1 Against modalism: possible worlds 1 1.2 Against modalism: Fine’s critique 7 1.3 Reductionism: the illusory search for innerconstitution 12 1.4 Why real essentialism? 18 2 Some varieties of anti-essentialism 21 2.1 Empiricist anti-essentialism 21 2.2 Quinean animadversions 25 2.3 Popper: avoiding ‘what-is?’ questions 30 2.4 Wittgenstein: the shadow of grammar 38 3 The reality and knowability of essence 44 3.1 Why essences are real 44 3.2 The ‘problem’ of the universal accidental 47 3.3 An empirical test for essence? 52 3.4 Coming to know essence 54 3.5 ‘Paradigms’, ‘stereotypes’, and classification 57 4 The structure of essence 62 4.1 Hylemorphism: act and potency 62 4.2 Substantial form 65 4.3 Prime matter 71 4.4 Substance 76 4.5 The immanence ofessence 81 5 Essence and identity 86 5.1 Real definition and the true law of identity 86 viii Contents 5.2 The Porphyrian Tree 92 5.3 The Analogyof Being 105 5.4 Individuation 108 5.5 Identity overtime 117 6 Essence and existence 121 6.1 The real distinction in contingent beings 121 6.2 Everything is contingent ... almost 125 6.3 Powers 130 6.4 Laws of nature 143 7 Aspects of essence 152 7.1 Kinds of accident 152 7.2 The nature of properties 156 7.3 Knowledge ofessence via properties 162 7.4 Artefacts 166 7.5 Origin and constitution 170 8 Life 177 8.1 The essence of life 177 8.2 Kinds of organism 183 8.3 Against emergence 193 9 Species, biological and metaphysical 201 9.1 Is biological essentialism dead? 201 9.2 Against the cladistic species concept 214 9.3 Vagueness 224 9.4 A plea for morphology 234 10 The person 241 10.1 The essence of personhood 241 10.2 Hylemorphic dualism 243 10.3 Consciousness, psychology, and the person 245 10.4 Form, body, and soul 248 10.5 Soul, intellect, and immateriality 250 10.6 Soul, identity, and material dependence 255 10.7 Conclusion 259 Notes 261 Bibliography 295 Index 309 List of illustrations Figures 5.1 The classification of fish 95 5.2 A metaphysical classification of gold 96 5.3 The classic tree of man 99 5.4 A typical example of the classification of humans given by contemporary biologists 100 5.5 A fuller classification of humans, from Hominoidea to Homo 101 7.1 A definition of red 153 9.1 A simplified cladogram showing the evolutionary relationships among organisms 215 9.2 A schematic lineage oforganisms 221 Preface The following study is an exercise in traditional metaphysics. By ‘traditional’ I mean, somewhat tendentiously, to qualify that method of thinking and those doctrines which, despite occasional interludes and conflicting inter- pretations, embodied the prevalent school of philosophy for nearly two thousand years. That is the school of Aristotelianism and its followers, in particular St Thomas Aquinas and the Thomists, who dominated philosophy throughout the medieval period, andwhose ideas continued to exercise influence despite the advent of Cartesianism, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the ascendancyof empiricism in anglophone philosophy. Its influence even lingeredon into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to be found especially in the domain of logic but also in metaphysics itself. Nevertheless, the decline of traditional philosophy, and of traditional metaphysics in particular, was assured by the movements mentioned above, the death sentence having already been pronounced by the nominalism and scepticism of late Scholasticism in the fifteenth century. The aim of Real Essentialism is to rehabilitate some of the core ideas of Aristotelian metaphysics in a contemporary context devoid of the minutiae of historical exposition and textual exegesis (though quite a bit of this will be found in the notes to each chapter). If traditional metaphysics is to have a future – and I believe it assuredly does – then it must not allow itself to be bogged down in interpretative niceties. Instead, it must show itself to be a living system and method for doing philosophy. Its concepts must be deployed to tackle fundamental problems, including those that occupy contemporary thought.Anditmustshakeitselffreeofthetime-wornrhetoricthathas,for several centuries, been used to vilify it in the absence of argument at worst, and, at best, by virtue of a highly defective understanding of just what the concepts and theses of neo-Aristotelianism actually mean. At the heart of traditional metaphysics is the thesis that everything has a real essence – an objective metaphysical principle determining its definition and classification. Such principles are not mere creatures of language or convention; rather, they belong to the very constitution of reality. Needless tosay,nobook candiscusstheessence ofeverythingthereis.WhatIaimto