The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy (Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy) [1 ed.] 0367442795, 9780367442798

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ESSENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

Essences have been assigned important but controversial explanatory roles in philosophical, scientific, and social theorizing. Is it possible for the same organism to be first a caterpillar and then a butterfly? Is it impossible for a human being to transform into an insect like Gregor Samsa does in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis? Is it impossible for Lot’s wife to survive being turned into a pillar of salt? Traditionally, essences (or natures) have been thought to help answer such central questions about existence, identity, persistence, and modality. These questions are not only of great philosophical interest, they also are of great interest to society at large. This Handbook surveys the state of the art on essence. Core issues about essence are discussed in 33 chapters, all of them written exclusively for this volume by leading experts. They are organized into the following four major parts, each with its own introduction that provides a summary and comparison of the part’s chapters: • • • •

History Essence and Essentialisms: Themes and Variations Applications Anti-Essentialist Challenges

The volume is accessible enough for students while also providing enough details to make it a valuable reference for researchers. While the notion of essence has been targeted for sustained criticisms since antiquity, recent work has renewed interest in the topic. This Handbook explains and synthesizes much of this current interest, placing essence within its historical context and drawing connections to many contemporary areas of philosophy as well as to scholarly work in other disciplines. With cross-references in each chapter and a comprehensive index, The Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy is a useful resource and essential reading for anyone, whether in or out of academic philosophy, seeking clarification on one of philosophy’s most distinctive and notorious notions. Kathrin Koslicki is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel. Koslicki’s research interests in philosophy lie mainly in metaphysics, the philosophy of language and ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle. In her two books (The Structure of Objects, Oxford UP, 2008; and Form, Matter, Substance, Oxford UP, 2018), she defends a neo-Aristotelian analysis of concrete particular objects as compounds of matter (hulē) and form (morphē). Michael J. Raven is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. He is a co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Metaphysics, and also a co-founder and steering committee member of the Metaphysics Collaborative.

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN PHILOSOPHY

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research. All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned, and written by leading scholars in the field. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provide indispensable reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and exciting topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks, anthologies, and research-orientated publications. Also available: THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIODIVERSITY Edited by Justin Garson, Anya Plutynski, and Sahotra Sarkar THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL MIND Edited by Julian Kiverstein THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF EMPATHY Edited by Heidi Maibom ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF EPISTEMIC CONTEXTUALISM Edited by Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF BRENTANO AND THE BRENTANO SCHOOL Edited by Uriah Kriegel THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF EPISTEMIC INJUSTICE Edited by Ian James Kidd, José Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF TEMPORAL EXPERIENCE Edited by Ian Philips For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ESSENCE IN PHILOSOPHY

Edited by Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven

Cover image: Rose Choi, Flight, 2023 First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-44279-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-74659-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00875-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003008750 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

To Kit

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

xi xv

Introduction Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven

1

PART 1

History

15

1 Ancient Marko Malink

19

2 Medieval Gloria Frost

30

3 Modern Anat Schechtman

41

4 Pragmatism Andrew Howat

53

5 Contemporary (Phenomenological Tradition) Kevin Mulligan

67

6 Contemporary (Analytic Tradition) Robert Michels

84

vii

Contents PART 2

Essence and Essentialisms: Themes and Variations

101

7 Modal Conceptions of Essence Alessandro Torza

105

8 Non-Modal Conceptions of Essence Fabrice Correia

124

9 Essences of Individuals Marco Marabello

143

10 Natural Kind Essentialism Tuomas E. Tahko

156

11 Origin Essentialism Teresa Robertson Ishii

169

12 Scientific Essentialism Travis Dumsday

181

13 Dispositional Essentialism Ka Ho Lam

194

14 The Epistemology of Essence Antonella Mallozzi

209

15 Language of Essence Katherine Ritchie

226

16 Logic of Essence Jon Erling Litland

240

PART 3

Applications

257

17 Artifacts, Artworks, and Social Objects Asya Passinsky

261

18 Biological Species Ingo Brigandt

276

viii

Contents

19 Identity, Persistence, and Individuation Maria Scarpati

291

20 Essence, Grounding, and Explanation David Mark Kovacs

305

21 The “Reduction” of Necessity to Non-Modal Essence Kathrin Koslicki

319

22 Persons Annina Loets

333

23 Psychiatric Kinds Danielle Brown

347

24 Race Ron Mallon

361

25 Sex and Gender Esther Rosario

375

26 Social Justice Natalie Stoljar

388

27 Unity Charlotte Witt

401

28 Ethical Value Stavroula Glezakos and Julie Tannenbaum

410

PART 4

Anti-Essentialist Challenges

425

29 Quine on Essence Kit Fine

427

30 Conventionalism Jonathan Livingstone-Banks and Alan Sidelle

437

31 Social Construction Aaron M. Griffith

455

ix

Contents

32 Conferralism Anand Jayprakash Vaidya and Michael Wallner

472

33 Wittgenstein Arata Hamawaki

487

Index

503

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Ingo Brigandt is Professor of Philosophy and Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Biology at the University of Alberta. His publications span across philosophy of biology, socially relevant philosophy of science, science education, and evolutionary developmental biology. Danielle Brown is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta. She is interested in the philosophy of psychiatry and the factors influencing the construction of psychiatric ontologies. Fabrice Correia is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Geneva. His main interests are in metaphysics and philosophical logic. He has published extensively on essence, grounding, ontological dependence, identity, modality and time, and has recently discovered the wonders of theorizing about location. Travis Dumsday is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University of Edmonton. He is the author of Dispositionalism and the Metaphysics of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Assisted Suicide in Canada: Moral, Legal, and Policy Considerations (University of British Columbia Press, 2021). Kit Fine is University Professor and Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. He writes on metaphysics, logic and philosophy of language and his most recent book is Vagueness: A Global Approach, published by Oxford University Press. Gloria Frost is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN). She is the author of Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) and articles which have appeared in journals such as Journal of the History of Philosophy, Ergo and Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy. Stavroula Glezakos is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. Her work is focused on issues at the intersection of philosophy of language, ethics, and social philosophy, and has been published in Linguistics and Philosophy and volumes with MIT and Oxford University Presses.

xi

Contributors

Aaron M. Griffith is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia USA. His research is on truth, truthmaking, grounding, social ontology, and the philosophy of race. His work has appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, Erkenntnis, and other journals. Arata Hamawaki is Associate Professor in Philosophy, Auburn University. He has published papers on Kant, Wittgenstein, Aesthetics, Epistemology, and the Nature of Judgment. Andrew Howat is a Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. His research focuses on truth, realism, and classical pragmatism (esp. C.S. Peirce), and he has published in journals such as Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis, Synthese, and Philosophia. Kathrin Koslicki is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel. Koslicki’s research interests in philosophy lie mainly in metaphysics, the philosophy of language and ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle. In her two books (The Structure of Objects, Oxford University Press, 2008; and Form, Matter, Substance, Oxford University Press, 2018), she defends a neo-Aristotelian analysis of concrete particular objects as compounds of matter (hulē) and form (morphē). David Mark Kovacs is a Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Ka Ho Lam is currently a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. Jon Erling Litland is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and professorial fellow at the University of Oslo. He has recently published papers about mathematical structuralism, the grounds of identity, propositional fineness of grain, as well as about the puzzles of ground. Jonathan Livingstone-Banks is a lecturer and senior researcher in evidence-based healthcare at the University of Oxford. His philosophical research interests include essentialism, realism/ anti-realism debates, and the philosophy of evidence-based healthcare. Annina Loets holds positions as Assistant Professor at Humboldt-University, Berlin and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests lie mainly in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. She has recently published papers on the metaphysics and semantics of qua-qualification, the logic of normality, as well as on the semantics of ability ascriptions. Marko Malink is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at New York University (USA). He is the author of Aristotle’s Modal Syllogistic (Harvard University Press, 2013), and various articles on Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics as well as on the history of logic. Ron Mallon is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy-NeurosciencePsychology program at Washington University in Saint Louis. His research is in social metaphysics and moral psychology. He is the author of the Construction of Human Kinds (2016, Oxford).

xii

Contributors

Antonella Mallozzi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Providence College and an associate editor of Analysis Reviews. She works primarily in metaphysics and epistemology. She is the editor of the special issue of Synthese “New Directions in the Epistemology of Modality”, a coauthor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “The Epistemology of Modality”, and the author of several recent articles on essence, explanation, the epistemology of imagination and the a priori. Marco Marabello is a doctoral assistant at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Robert Michels, since 2022, is FCT assistant researcher and a member of LanCog at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. His research interests include essence, modality, indeterminacy, the laws of nature, and the history of analytic philosophy. Kevin Mulligan is professor of philosophy, University of Italian Switzerland, Director of Research, Institute of Philosophical Studies, Lugano, and honorary professor of analytic philosophy, University of Geneva. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters and the Academia Europaea. Asya Passinsky is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. She specializes in metaphysics, social philosophy, and feminist philosophy, and her work has appeared in academic journals such as Philosophers’ Imprint, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Inquiry, and Journal of Social Ontology. Katherine Ritchie is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine in the United States. Her research focuses on the metaphysics of social groups and the ways we represent social groups mentally and linguistically. Her articles have appeared in journals including Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Cognitive Psychology, Ethics, Mind & Language, Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, among others. Teresa Robertson Ishii is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her primary academic interests are in analytic metaphysics and the philosophy of language. Charmed by puzzles and paradoxes, she has recently published articles on hylomorphism and the Russell-Myhill paradox; kinds and a puzzle about them; and plenitudinarianism and the paradox of flexible origin essentialism. Esther Rosario is a lecturer in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on the metaphysics of sex and gender. She is especially interested in sex and gender kinds. Her current research centers on sex as a biological kind. Her previous research includes conceptual engineering projects for sex, gender, and race concepts. She is also interested in social metaphysics broadly construed, the metaphysics of science, the philosophy of biology, science and values, and metaphilosophy. Maria Scarpati got her PhD at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) with a thesis on metaphysical haecceitism and individual essences. She then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Geneva and University of Oxford, focusing on the topic of unity relations.

xiii

Contributors

Anat Schechtman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She has written on Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke, publishing in Mind, Philosophical Review, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and elsewhere. She is currently writing a monograph about early modern notions of infinity. Alan Sidelle is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of Necessity, Essence and Individuation: A Defense of Conventionalism (1989). Natalie Stoljar is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy, Faculty of Medicine. Her research expertise is in social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of law. She has published numerous articles and book chapters and is co-editor (with C. Mackenzie) of Relational Autonomy. Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self (OUP 2000) and (with K. Voigt) of Autonomy and Equality. Relational Approaches (Routledge 2021). Tuomas E. Tahko is Professor of Metaphysics of Science at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of Unity of Science (Cambridge UP, 2021) and An Introduction to Metametaphysics (Cambridge UP, 2015), and editor of Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge UP, 2012). Julie Tannenbaum is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pomona College. Her research in ethical theory and bioethics has been published in Ethics, Bioethics, Hastings Center Report, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Philosophical Studies, and The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Alessandro Torza is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Parma. He is author of Indeterminacy in the World (Cambridge UP), as well as a number of articles on indeterminacy, modality, and (meta)metaphysics at large. Anand Jayprakash Vaidya is Professor of Philosophy at San Jose State University and occasional Director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy. Since 2005 his research has focused on the epistemology of modality, essence, and grounding. Michael Wallner is “Universitätsassistent” (Assistant Professor – fixed term) at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria. He is predominantly working in metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology and focuses on issues in modality, essence, grounding, explanation, and fundamentality. Charlotte Witt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of Substance and Essence in Aristotle and Ways of Being in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, both published by Cornell University Press. She is the co-editor of A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity and three other collections including Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays. Recent work includes a monograph The Metaphysics of Gender (Oxford 2011) and an edited volume Feminist Metaphysics: Explorations in the Ontology of Sex, Gender and the Self (Springer 2011).

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The initial idea for this volume emerged from our collaborations on the Metaphysics Collaborative (formerly, the Canadian Metaphysics Collaborative). We are grateful for the advice from three anonymous referees, as well as Andrew Beck and Marc Stratton at Routledge, for helping this idea take shape. There were plans to further develop and integrate the chapters by having authors workshop early drafts with one another in Switzerland. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted these plans (along with so many others). We pivoted, inviting authors to workshop their early drafts virtually in June 2021. We are grateful for their flexibility and for their cooperative and productive engagement with each other’s work. Editing this volume gave us the opportunity to recruit and engage with an extraordinary group of authors. Working with, and learning from, them has been a delight. We thank them all for their excellent contributions to this volume. Marco Marabello and Emilie Pagano provided vital organizational assistance in preparing the volume. We thank them both for their outstanding work. The volume is the culmination of the 5-year project “The Essence of Anti-Essentialism”, which was funded by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). We are grateful to SSHRC for supporting this volume directly, and for its indirect support for Emilie Pagano’s postdoctoral fellowship. Rose Choi provided the original cover art for this volume. Whatever aesthetic virtues the volume has we owe to her artistic talents. We thank her for her contribution. Our final acknowledgement is to Kit Fine. It would be hard to overstate his influence on this volume, or indeed on contemporary metaphysics. Even those who have only glanced at the recent literature on essence will know how profoundly his work has shaped it. Without it, there would be no place in the literature for this volume. Kit also helped foster the volume itself. He provided detailed feedback on many chapters. And he encouraged us throughout. The volume was improved by his generosity and support. But even with all that said, our gratitude goes far beyond. An anecdote may help convey how. Mike wrote his first philosophy term paper on “Essence and Modality” back in spring 2000. Although still a newcomer to philosophy, he recognized it as an iconoclastic work (at least, back then) by a maverick philosopher (still to this day). That paper had an enormous impact on him: not just for its originality and its contrast with the prevailing wisdom, but also in a more personally

xv

Acknowledgements

philosophical way. It was only two decades later while writing an encyclopedia entry “Kit Fine” that he realized just how deeply Kit’s philosophical approach had affected him. That approach is manifest in “Essence and Modality”: inspiringly respectful in its attempt to understand its topic properly for what it is, while boldly resolute in resisting cynical shortcuts that diminish or distort its topic. It was an aspirational model of philosophical virtue. Those fortunate enough to have philosophized with Kit know that he is too.

xvi

INTRODUCTION Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven

1 Essence Is it possible for one and the same organism to be first a caterpillar and then a butterfly? Is it impossible for a human being to undergo the sort of transformation we encounter in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning only to find himself transformed into a giant insect? Is it impossible for Lot’s wife to survive being turned into a pillar of salt? What (if anything) determines when an entity comes into or goes out of existence? More generally, in virtue of what (if anything) is an entity identical to itself at a time or over time? Through what sorts of changes (if any) can an entity persist? What (if anything) explains what features an entity must have in order for it to exist at all, and which features are compatible with its nature but optional (i.e., its modal profile)? Traditionally, essences (or natures) have been taken to play important roles in helping to answer such central questions about existence, identity, persistence, and modality. Unless responses to these questions can be found, key questions about the world will go unanswered.1 If a certain feature is essential to an entity, then (at the very least) the entity in question cannot exist without having the feature in question; a feature that is not essential to an entity is accidental to it. For example, if Socrates is essentially human but merely accidentally a philosopher, then Socrates must be human if he is to exist at all, but he could have existed without being a philosopher. For example, Socrates could have been an architect. An essence can either be a general or kind essence or an individual essence: a general or kind essence is shared by members of a single kind; an individual essence is distinctive of an individual instance of a certain kind. There has been significant debate about whether kinds are associated with essences and whether it is part of the meaning of certain of our words to connect us to these essences (Bird & Tobin 2012; Khalidi 2013; Koslicki 2008; Kripke 1971, 1980; Putnam 1962, 1975). A statement of the essence, or “real definition”, aims to tell us what it is to be the entity in question; such statements contrast with “nominal definitions” which aim to capture instead what a certain word means or what a certain concept represents. Strictly speaking, nominal definitions may also be viewed as a special case of real definitions; only the entity that is being defined, in this case, is a linguistic expression or a concept, rather than a non-linguistic or non-conceptual entity that is denoted by the expression or concept in question. To illustrate,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003008750-1

1

Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven

one might think that the statement (real definition), “Gold is a chemical element with atomic number 79”, captures the essence of, or what it is to be, gold, while the statement (nominal definition), “A centaur is a mythological creature with the upper body of a human being and the lower body of a horse”, captures what the English word, “centaur”, means or what the concept, centaur, represents. Essentialists hold that grasping the essence of, or what it is to be, an entity is crucial to an accurate understanding of the world, independently of how we represent or conceptualize the entity in question and independently of what we value relative to a particular context. Antiessentialists, by contrast, interpret our apparent essence ascriptions as in some way reflective of our specifically human interests, goals, or practices, rather than of the world “as such”, i.e., as it would be if we somehow managed to subtract from it our specifically human contributions. When we speak of an entity as being essentially thus-and-so, the anti-essentialist regards such a characterization as being indicative merely of the fact that some feature is being singled out, in a particular context, as especially salient or important from a specifically human point of view. Historically, the doctrine of essentialism traces back at least to Plato, who in his middle period (e.g., Phaedo, Republic, Symposium) in effect reified essences in the guise of immaterial, changeless, and eternal forms (e.g., justice, beauty, goodness) and argued that we can arrive at genuine knowledge or understanding only when we are able to grasp these forms from which sensible particulars derive their characteristics. Aristotle invented a special technical phrase, “to ti ēn einai” (literally “what it was to be”), to refer to the essence of an entity and assigned an enormously important role to definitions (statements of the essence) in his Posterior Analytics, where they function as first principles or axioms (archai) within his theory of demonstrative scientific knowledge (epistēmē). Many of Aristotle’s central metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning essence, e.g., its relation to substance and form, continued to occupy center stage during the medieval period, particularly insofar as they interacted with specific Christian doctrines (e.g., transubstantiation or resurrection). These medieval debates were subjected to an increasingly critical reception during the early modern period by such thinkers as Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, all of whom were skeptically inclined not only towards the existence of essences, but also towards our ability to grasp them. In modern times, essentialism came under serious attack from a variety of directions, as is illustrated by the following criticisms from philosophy, natural science, and social science. Firstly, during the first half of the 20th century, W. V. Quine famously objected that a view he calls “Aristotelian essentialism” is incoherent (Quine 1953). Some of Quine’s concerns were logical and have since been put to rest by developments in modal logic (Kripke 1963; Marcus 1967). But Quine’s other concerns were of a more metaphysical nature and are still debated among metaphysicians today (Della Rocca 1996a, 1996b; Koslicki 2020; Paul 2004, 2006). Essentialists, in Quine’s view, are unable to meet the demand for necessary and sufficient conditions by which to identify the very same entity across different possible scenarios (or “worlds”); and the idea that each entity is associated with an unchanging kernel of essential features is called into question by Quine’s position that “you can change anything to anything by easy stages through some connecting series of possible worlds” (Quine 1976, p. 861). According to Quine, an apparent essence ascription must always be interpreted as displaying some relativity to a particular way of singling out the entities under consideration, e.g., when we say of human beings that they are essentially rational but only accidentally bipedal, we must specify whether we have in mind human beings qua mathematicians or qua bicyclists. Without filling in the alleged ellipsis in such apparent essence ascriptions, Quine could attach no sense to an utterance which purports to express that an entity has a certain nature or essence in itself and independently of its being described in a certain way (Cartwright 1968).

2

Introduction

Secondly, it has been argued by natural scientists and philosophers of science that essentialism is incompatible both with the results of our best scientific theories and with the aims of our best scientific practices. For one thing, the fact that species evolve evidently contradicts Aristotle’s assumption that the essences associated with biological species are eternal and unchanging (Brigandt 2009; Ereshefsky 2004; Hacking 2007; Love 2009; Nanay 2011; Wilson, Baker & Brigandt 2007). In addition, given that the goals and interests driving scientists in their practices are multi-faceted, the recent “turn to practice” in the philosophy of science recommends a pluralistic attitude towards systems of classification in place of essentialism about natural kinds (Dupré 1993; Love & Brigandt 2017; Minelli 2014; Waters 2017; Wilson 1999). Thirdly, essentialism has been a central target in the debate concerning the status of social categories such as race and gender. Whether social categories, such as race and gender, represent real and objective divisions among people who share certain essential characteristics is highly controversial and widely disputed, e.g., by those who take these categories to be fictional, conventional, socially constructed, or reflective of unjust hierarchies. For example, on the assumption that a person has their gender essentially, trans people would not survive their gender transitions (Appiah 1990). According to Simone de Beauvoir, for example, “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman” (de Beauvoir 2011, p. 607); Judith Butler argues that gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed” (Butler 1988, p. 527; Butler 2007); and Sally Haslanger proposes that, in an ideal society which lacks the systematic oppression or subordination of some groups by others, such categories as woman or African American would become obsolete and should therefore be abandoned (Haslanger 2000, 2005, 2012).

2 Why This Volume, and Why Now? Given these serious and wide-ranging criticisms to which essentialism has been subjected, one may legitimately wonder whether this doctrine is not simply a vestige left over from ancient and medieval times that should have been abandoned a long time ago. In fact, however, the debate between essentialists and anti-essentialists is alive and well and has, if anything, gained momentum in light of an increased interest among philosophers working across a wide range of subdisciplines in so-called “hyper-intensional” notions, e.g., metaphysical ground (Raven 2020), which attempt to draw more fine-grained distinctions than those that can be captured by standard logical and modal tools. The purpose of this Handbook is to provide a state-of-the-art survey of contemporary philosophical debates concerning essence. There are at least three main motivations for this volume. The first is to collate the often-fragmented literature on essence. Most of the literature on essence belongs to one of several clusters, such as biological essentialism, social essentialism, the metaphysics of essence, the logic of essence, skeptical challenges to essence, and so on. Despite each of these clusters focusing on essence in one way or another, the literature on each has often developed largely independently of the rest. This Handbook seeks to unite these clusters under one banner. We hope that this endeavor in turn will also help to facilitate comparative studies of the role of essence within each cluster. Secondly, the recent literature on essence, in our estimation, has at times been dominated by an unhealthy focus on a handful of examples, such as the relation between Socrates and Socrates’ singleton set, which is cited in Kit Fine’s influential work on essence and modality as a counterexample to modal approaches to essence (Fine 1994). This myopic focus on particular cases may at times encourage the tendency to overgeneralize what are in fact idiosyncratic features. It is our hope that this Handbook can contribute to a reorientation of

3

Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven

these debates away from an unhelpful preoccupation with specific examples and towards an active engagement with the larger, and ultimately more important, underlying philosophical issues. A third reason for which the present volume strikes us as timely is that essentialists and anti-essentialists often appear to be talking past each other. For one thing, some antiessentialists end up attacking a “strawman” version of the opposing view. These antiessentialists load up the notion of essence with so many constraints that no reasonably minded contemporary essentialist would want to accept the resulting notion of essence. To illustrate, to assume right from the start, as is sometimes done, that essential features must also be intrinsic immediately closes off questions on which in fact no consensus has as of yet been reached. For instance, philosophers disagree about whether an individual’s actual origins are essential to it and to what extent essentialism can be applied within the social domain. By contrast, essentialists may be tempted to respond to anti-essentialist challenges by arguing that the relevant notion of essence need not meet the constraints in question (e.g., intrinsicality, mind-independence, or the demand that essences must supply necessary and sufficient conditions for kind-membership). In the process, however, essentialists risk embracing a notion of essence that is so stripped down that it can no longer perform the relevant explanatory roles that essences were supposed to play. The most persuasive version of anti-essentialism thus will be one which does not build implausible and outdated assumptions into what essences are taken to be. Conversely, the strongest version of essentialism will be one that does not simply ignore important challenges to essentialism that have been put forward by anti-essentialists. Ideally, both essentialists and anti-essentialists alike should be interested in targeting a dialectically strong and appropriate notion of essence that cannot easily be dismissed or discredited by the opposing camp. It is our hope that this Handbook may help to clarify such a target notion, as well as the various debates that engage with it.

3 Primer Discussions of essence often involve making subtle distinctions, drawing intricate connections between neighboring notions, and so on. The distinctions and notions in play have evolved over time. And just which are in play can change: some that were historically prominent remain so while others drift away, and still others only emerged recently. But all these perturbations may be seen as orbiting a single distinction at their center of gravity. This is the distinction between essence and accident. At least in modern times, this is standardly thought of as a distinction among an item’s properties. On the one hand, a property may hold in virtue of an item’s identity, or be part of what it is to be that item. Such a property is essential to the item. On the other hand, a property may hold of an item but not by virtue of its identity. Such a property is inessential or accidental to the item. Before proceeding, a methodological qualification is needed. It is hard to find uncontroversial examples. This is not because examples are hard to find. Most any domain provides many. It is rather that controversies await even those examples that may strike us, at least at first, as most plausible. The examples discussed should not be thought of as comprehensively covering all the bases. Nor should they be thought of as conclusive illustrations immune to challenge. They should, however, at least help to fix ideas. Michelangelo sculpted the statue David. What differentiates a statue from a sculpture is that a statue must be of a person or animal. So, David wouldn’t be what it is—a statue—were it not humanoid. It lies in the nature, or identity, of David to be humanoid. That is, David’s humanoid shape is essential to it.

4

Introduction

But many of its material properties are not. Nothing about the nature, or identity, of David requires it to have its exact material composition. The protective patina Michelangelo polished into David eroded long ago. David’s left arm was repaired after being broken off in a riot in 1527. And in 1991 David’s toe was damaged by a hammer-wielding attacker. These events changed the marble David is made of. These were changes in how David is composed, but not in what David is. The changed material properties are accidental, not essential, to David. In making a claim of essence, our intention is to make a claim about an item itself, and not just our conception of it. Some have thought that this cannot be done. Locke famously distinguished between real essence and nominal essence. The real essence of an item is what it is. By contrast, the nominal essence of an item is, roughly, our abstract conception of what an item is. Locke argued that we do not grasp whatever real essences there may be, and so are stuck with only their nominal essences. Whether or not he was right, we may still sharply distinguish between real and nominal essences and insist that our focus is on the former. The example of David illustrates how the distinction between essential and accidental properties applies to an individual item. But the distinction appears to generalize to kinds of items as well. Suppose there is a certain kind of thing: a statue. Then being a humanoid is essential to being a statue, whereas being made of marble is not. We may later extend our discussion to kinds, if we wish. But, for now, our focus will be on individuals, like David. It may be that some properties are had essentially if at all, or accidentally if at all. For example, perhaps a number is prime only if it is essentially prime. In such cases, if there are any, it may be permissible to speak of the property itself as essential, or accidental. But, usually, a property is essential or accidental only relative to an item which has it essentially or accidentally. The property of being humanoid is essential to David, but it is only accidental to the marble. David is made (mostly) of a certain chunk of marble. This may be just an accidental property of David’s. Perhaps David could have been made from a different chunk of marble, or perhaps not even marble but bronze (although see Kripke 1980 for an opposing view). Be that as it may, it does not seem as if David could be what it is without being made of matter of some or other sort. If so, David is essentially made of matter. We have identified a second essential property of David’s. Each of these, on its own, partially characterizes what David is. So, in identifying both, we more fully characterize what David is. If there is a full characterization of what David is, then it is the essence of David. In general, the essence of an item is a full characterization of what it is. The essence of an item, so understood, may be identified with, or at least taken to determine, all of its essential properties. We have used various locutions to characterize the distinction. This is partly because none is ideal. Each has its own misleading insinuations. We may prevent misunderstandings by flagging them. In saying that an essential property concerns what something is as opposed to how it is, one might think there is an insinuation that essential properties don’t also concern how things are. But that is not so. There is no need to prohibit a sense in which how something is includes what it is. What is required, however, is allowing that how something is does not settle what it is. Similarly, there is no need to prohibit an expansive sense of “identity” that includes all of an item’s properties. What is required is just the recognition of a narrower sense of “identity” that excludes an item’s accidental properties. In saying that it lies in the nature of David to be humanoid, one might think there is an insinuation that essential properties must concern the natural world. And, of course, some claims of essence do. Perhaps, for example, it lies in the nature of butane to have four carbon

5

Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven

atoms. But even when an essentialist claim is about the natural world, it is not just because of the use of the word ‘nature’ in the phrase “it lies in the nature of”. Essentialist claims needn’t concern the natural world. For example, Descartes thought that he was essentially a thinking thing. He was, notoriously, not making a claim about the natural world. And, for another example, the number 2 is essentially prime. This too is not a claim about the natural world (it may be what some philosophers call an “unworldly” claim). When phrases like “lies in the nature of” express claims of essence, they are not biased for, or against, anything to do with the natural world. In saying what an item is, one might think there is an insinuation against referring to other items. After all, if our aim was to say what David is, why must anything else be referred to? Indeed, one way to expose an alleged essentialist claim as incorrect is to point out that it involves extraneous things. Although David is now located in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, this is not essential to it. (It could be, and has been, moved.) One may be tempted to explain why David’s location is only accidental to it by saying that its location involves things (Florence) external to it. And this may tempt one into assuming that, in general, an essential property of an item must be internal or intrinsic to it. As common as this intrinsicality assumption may be, it is clearly an adjunct. There is nothing latent in the essence/accident distinction requiring essential properties to be intrinsic. Moreover, many prominent examples of the distinction are incompatible with such a requirement. This includes our own example. To illustrate, there is a difference between marble sculpted to be humanoid and a chunk of marble shaped by erosion to be humanoid. The difference is that the sculptor intended to represent an actual or fictional human (or perhaps just some or other human in general). We may accordingly refine what we mean in claiming that David is essentially humanoid: it is essentially sculpted by a sculptor intending it to represent the biblical David. By contrast, a chunk of marble shaped by erosion isn’t essentially humanoid. It’s accidental that it was. This refinement makes plain that the property ascribed to David as essential is not intrinsic in any recognizable sense. It refers, at least implicitly, to its sculptor and the sculptor’s intentions, as well as to the biblical David himself. Further counterexamples to the intrinsicality assumption derive from Kripke’s influential discussions of essence. Most of his examples involve historical essences. He suggests, for instance, that it may be essential to a complex material object that it originate in the matter from which it was formed. He also suggests that it may be essential to a person to originate in the sperm and egg from which they grew. Claims like these ascribe historical properties as essential. Such historical properties may make reference, at least implicitly, to items external to the item in question. For example, the sperm and egg from which I grew are identified by coming from, respectively, my father and my mother. For another example, the prominent phylogenetic conception of a species partly identifies a species’ members by their ancestral lineage. Historical properties, in general, needn’t be intrinsic. So, if historical properties may be essential, then it cannot consistently be required that they also be intrinsic. The preceding considerations were meant to help home in on a target notion of essence. Much more remains to be said about it, and notions in the vicinity. There is no hope of canvassing them all comprehensively here. Still, it will be helpful to survey some of the more prominent of these in one place. Many of the distinctions and issues that follow were introduced, or at least introduced into the contemporary literature, by Kit Fine’s pioneering article “Senses of Essence” (Fine 1995). Further discussions of them, and much more, may be found across the chapters in this volume, especially those in Part II. Objectual/generic. The example above focused on the essential properties of an object: the statue David. This illustrates the objectual notion of essence: essence as it applies to objects.

6

Introduction

But there is also a generic (or predicational) notion of essence: essence as it applies to what is predicated to objects. If we assume that being of a kind is expressed by predication, then we have already seen an illustration: to be a statue is essentially to be a sculpture of a person or animal. This is meant to capture part of what it is to be a statue, as opposed to what it is to be this statue (say, David). The distinction between objectual and generic essence, however, is not the end of the line. If one is theorizing in a setting of higher-order logic, then we may also ask about essences of higher-order types. For example, one may admit a notion of essence as it applies to operations (such as truth-functions) on what is predicated to objects. Partial/full. Earlier we considered two essential properties of David’s. Each partially characterizes what David is. Neither alone, nor perhaps jointly, fully characterizes what David is. We were implicitly appealing to a distinction between partial and full essence. Just how it gets drawn, however, depends on whether it is assumed that there is a full characterization of what an item is. If the assumption is granted, then the full characterization may be identified with its full essence. This will be, or will determine, a complete list of its essential properties. Each of these will be part of its full essence. So, granting the assumption, partial essence may be defined as part of a full essence. Without the assumption, however, partial essence cannot be defined as part of a full essence. It must, instead, be allowed that an essential property of an item may only strictly partially characterize what it is even if there is no full characterization of which it is a part. The preceding distinctions contrast features of the core notion of essence. Several additional distinctions contrast ways in which a conception of essence may be more or less discriminating: Immediate/mediate. There is a distinction between an immediate notion of essence that concerns only what is part of an item’s own identity and a mediate notion that also concerns the identities of any items on which it depends. To illustrate, we supposed that David is essentially humanoid. Now consider the singleton set {David} which, we suppose, essentially contains David. Is it essential to the set {David} that David is humanoid? The answer is “No” on the immediate notion, but “Yes” on the mediate notion. The mediate essence of {David} is therefore “hereditary” in that it includes all that is essential to its “ancestors”, such as David. In general, when an item depends on others, their essential properties must be included in its mediate essence but needn’t be included in its immediate essence. Constitutive/consequential. There is a distinction between a consequential notion of essence that includes essential properties had merely as consequences of others and a constitutive notion that excludes these. This distinction may at first seem to repeat the immediate/mediate distinction. But there is a significant difference. The consequential essence of an item is not limited to including only what is essential to what that item depends on. To illustrate, we supposed that David is essentially humanoid. Nothing whatsoever about David depends on being a turnip. But it is a logical consequence of anything’s being humanoid that it is humanoid or a turnip. Is it essential to David that it is humanoid or a turnip? The answer is “Yes” on the consequential notion, but “No” on the constitutive notion. In general, the constitutive notion of essence captures the “core” of an item’s identity, whereas the consequential notion captures the logical closure of its “core” (for some given notion of logical consequence). Individual/collective. Our examples, so far, focused on the essential properties of individuals. We may also allow for collections of individuals to have essential properties. This may be desirable in cases where there is no other way to distinguish individuals. For example, there are two solutions to the quadratic equation x2 + 1 = 0. The solutions are algebraically indistinguishable. The solutions may be distinguished once one is labeled as the

7

Kathrin Koslicki and Michael J. Raven

imaginary unit i and the other as its inverse -i. But the labeling is arbitrary. So, it may be doubted whether the referent of ‘i’ can be fixed independently of ‘-i’s. If so, it is unclear that ‘i is essentially -i’s inverse’ says anything different than ‘-i is essentially i’s inverse’. And even if it does, the two claims may involve an objectionable circularity: for part of the identity of each solution is stated in terms of the other. The notion of collective essence may help avoid these difficulties. For it may be taken to be essential to the collection i,-i together that they are inverses. (Cases like this are discussed in Litland 2022). Definition and essence. We used the phrase ‘part of what it is’ to express an essential property of an item. This phrase is also often used in connection with definition. For example, in stating that part of what it is to be a triangle is to have three angles, we may be stating that it is part of the definition of a triangle to have three angles. These points are confirmed by a venerable tradition associating definition and essence. It may be that not all essences are stateable. But when an item has a stateable essence, its definition is the statement of its essence. (Confusingly, and as mentioned earlier, a definition is sometimes taken to be an item’s essence itself, not just a statement of its essence.) While a definition is a statement of essence, it is a separate matter whether what is defined is itself a statement, or any other linguistic object. It may be in some cases. For example, in stating that ‘bachelor’ means unmarried man, one is stating the essence of the word ‘bachelor’. By contrast, other definitions do not state the essence of anything linguistic. For example, in stating that David is essentially humanoid, one is stating part of the essence of the statue David. The connection between definition and essence suggests that each of the distinctions for essence has an analogue for definition. For example, given that it is part of David’s essence to be humanoid, the statement that this is so is a partial definition of David. For another example, given that being humanoid is part of the mediate essence of the singleton set {David}, the statement that this is so is a partial mediate definition of {David}. And, for a third example, given that it is essential to the collection i,-i that they are inverses, the statement that this is so is a collective definition of the pair i,-i. Expressing essence. Essentialist claims may be expressed in various ways. The differences in the manner of expression suggest different regimentations of their grammatical form. There are two main approaches. The predicational approach expresses essence by means of a predicate modifier, usually ‘essentially’. This is attached to a predicate to form a complex predicate “essentializing” it. The complex predicate is then applied to a subject term denoting the item whose essence is at issue. This approach is most naturally suggested by locutions of the form ‘x is essentially ϕ’. For example, essentially-humanoid(David) gives the underlying form of ‘David is essentially humanoid’. The sentential approach expresses essence by means of a sentential operator, usually an indexed ‘◻’. The index is a term standing for the item whose essence is in question. The indexed operator is then prefixed to a sentence. This approach is most naturally suggested by locutions of the form ‘it lies in the nature of x that ϕ’. For example, ◻DavidHumanoid(David) gives the underlying form of ‘It lies in the nature of David to be humanoid’.

8

Introduction

Other approaches have also appeared in the literature. Perhaps the most recent of these is Fine’s (2015) oversize arrow notation: x = David �x Humanoid(x) Each of the approaches offers its benefits and costs, with some being better suited for some purposes than others. Nevertheless, the sentential approach has become the dominant approach, and is the most followed in this volume as well. Many of the preceding distinctions largely focused on broadly structural features of essence, or the expression of essence. Other distinctions have more to do with the substantive or contentful features of essence. Among the most important of these is how essence relates to modality. Modality. Essence is often associated with modality: what is necessary, contingent, or impossible. Philosophers have distinguished between various modal notions. Especially since Kripke (1980), many have thoug