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The new Aristotelian essentialists

Noonan, Harold

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Authors

HAROLD NOONAN HAROLD.NOONAN@NOTTINGHAM.AC.UK
Professor of Mind and Cognition



Abstract

In recent years largely due to the seminal work of Kit Fine and that of Jonathan Lowe there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of essence and the project of explaining de re necessity in terms of it. Of course, Quine rejected what he called Aristotelian essentialism in his battle against quantified modal logic. But what he and Kripke debated was a notion of essence defined in terms of de re necessity. The new Aristotelian essentialists regard essence as entailing but prior in the order of explanation to de re necessity. In what follows I argue that the concept of essence so understood has not been adequately explained and that any attempt to explain it, at least along the lines most familiar from the literature, must be flagrantly circular or make use of de re modal notions.

Citation

Noonan, H. (2018). The new Aristotelian essentialists. Metaphysica, 19(1), https://doi.org/10.1515/mp-2018-0004

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 3, 2017
Online Publication Date Dec 16, 2017
Publication Date Jan 1, 2018
Deposit Date May 31, 2018
Publicly Available Date Dec 17, 2018
Journal Metaphysica
Print ISSN 1437-2053
Electronic ISSN 1874-6373
Publisher De Gruyter
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 19
Issue 1
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/mp-2018-0004
Keywords essentialism; de dicto necessity; de re necessity; sortal concepts
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/963906
Publisher URL https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/mp.2018.19.issue-1/mp-2018-0004/mp-2018-0004.xml
Contract Date May 31, 2018

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