Real essentialism

329 Pages·2007·3.07 MB·English

by  David S Oderberg

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
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SimultaneouslypublishedintheUK
byRoutledge
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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