It is often claimed that principles of individuation imply essential properties of the things individuated. For example, sets are individuated by their members, hence sets have their members essentially. But how does this inference work? First I discuss the form of such inferences, and conclude that the essentialist inference is not a purely formal matter: although there is a form which all principles of individuation have in common, it is not true that any statement of that form is a principle (...) of individuation, and hence there is no valid inference based purely on that form. However, I argue that there is a viable version of the essentialist inference nonetheless. The resources for a proper reconstruction of this type of inference can be gathered from reflections upon the role principles of individuation play in the project of the ontologist: such principles turn out to carry a modal weight similar to that of definitions or conceptual truths. It follows that, no matter how austere the ontology, some portion of essentialist modality is inevitable. (shrink)

Life poses a threat to materialism. To understand the phenomena of animate nature, we make use of a teleological form of explanation that is peculiar to biology, of explanations in terms of what I call the ‘vital categories’ – and this holds even for accounts of underlying physico-chemical ‘mechanisms’. The materialist claims that this teleological form of explanation does not capture what is metaphysically fundamental, whereas her preferred physical form of explanation does. In this essay, I do three things. (1) (...) I argue that the ‘vital categories’, such as life form and life-process, do not reduce to the ‘physical categories’ and show that there are no grounds for the materialist's metaphysically limiting claim; (2) I sketch a positive view on how vital and physical explanations can both apply to a given phenomenon, and on how they interrelate; and (3) I show that this view meshes nicely with evolutionary theory, despite being committed to a form of ‘biological essentialism’. (shrink)

The article deals with the problem concerning the language of metaphysics. Metaphysics is understood as knowledge about the world as a whole. It is argued that such a perspective needs specific language tools for the description of metaphysical reality. The principal characteristic of the terms of the language aimed at describing the world metaphysically is their ultimate abstractness. It is stated that this abstractness not just corresponds but coincides with the ultimate simplicity of metaphysical reality, that is to say, the (...) reality of the world as a whole. The analysis of the ultimate reality or the absolute leads to the conclusion that both such reality and its depiction is ruled by a special logic different from what is conventionally considered to be logical. Elements of this logic are the ultimate abstractions. As it turned out, logical laws do not apply to extremely abstract objects, first of all, the law of contradiction. In the logic of the absolute, mutually exclusive statements point both to the same and not the same reality. The analysis shows that this is not the dialectical logic of contradiction and denial, it is the logic of the consistent unity and coexistence of identity and difference. The use of identities and differences in their ultimate sense allows us to determine the basic concepts of a metaphysical description – being, existence, the existing, difference, identity. Basic concepts serve as a necessary and sufficient basis for a complete metaphysical description of the entire existing, that is, the world as a whole. Going beyond the basic concepts, we, however, move from the logic of ultimate reality to the usual logic of empirical reality. (shrink)