Switch to: Citations

References in:

From Essence to Necessity via Identity

Mind 130 (519):887-908 (2021)

Add references

You must login to add references.
  1. Modality is Not Explainable by Essence.Carlos Romero - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274):121-141.
    Some metaphysicians believe that metaphysical modality is explainable by the essences of objects. In §II, I spell out the definitional view of essence, and in §III, a working notion of metaphysical explanation. Then, in §IV, I consider and reject five natural ways to explain necessity by essence: in terms of the principle that essential properties can't change, in terms of the supposed obviousness of the necessity of essential truth, in terms of the logical necessity of definitions, in terms of Fine's (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   28 citations  
  • (1 other version)Essence and Mere Necessity.Jessica Leech - 2018 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82:309-332.
    Recently, a debate has developed between those who claim that essence can be explained in terms of de re modality (modalists), and those who claim that de re modality can be explained in terms of essence (essentialists). The aim of this paper is to suggest that we should reassess. It is assumed that either necessity is to be accounted for in terms of essence, or that essence is to be accounted for in terms of necessity. I will argue that we (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • The limits of non-standard contingency.Robert Michels - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (2):533-558.
    Gideon Rosen has recently sketched an argument which aims to establish that the notion of metaphysical modality is systematically ambiguous. His argument contains a crucial sub-argument which has been used to argue for Metaphysical Contingentism, the view that some claims of fundamental metaphysics are metaphysically contingent rather than necessary. In this paper, Rosen’s argument is explicated in detail and it is argued that the most straight-forward reconstruction fails to support its intended conclusion. Two possible ways to save the argument are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Grounding, Essence, And Identity.Fabrice Correia & Alexander Skiles - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (3):642-670.
    Recent metaphysics has turned its focus to two notions that are—as well as having a common Aristotelian pedigree—widely thought to be intimately related: grounding and essence. Yet how, exactly, the two are related remains opaque. We develop a unified and uniform account of grounding and essence, one which understands them both in terms of a generalized notion of identity examined in recent work by Fabrice Correia, Cian Dorr, Agustín Rayo, and others. We argue that the account comports with antecedently plausible (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   93 citations  
  • (1 other version)To Be F Is To Be G.Cian Dorr - 2016 - Philosophical Perspectives 30 (1):39-134.
    This paper is an investigation of the general logic of "identifications", claims such as 'To be a vixen is to be a female fox', 'To be human is to be a rational animal', and 'To be just is to help one's friends and harm one's enemies', many of which are of great importance to philosophers. I advocate understanding such claims as expressing higher-order identity, and discuss a variety of different general laws which they might be thought to obey. [New version: (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   191 citations  
  • (12 other versions)An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.John Locke - 1690 - Cleveland,: Oxford University Press UK. Edited by P. H. Nidditch.
    'To think often, and never to retain it so much as one moment, is a very useless sort of thinking' In An Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke sets out his theory of knowledge and how we acquire it. Eschewing doctrines of innate principles and ideas, Locke shows how all our ideas, even the most abstract and complex, are grounded in human experience and attained by sensation of external things or reflection upon our own mental activities. A thorough examination of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   277 citations  
  • Sameness and Substance Renewed.David Wiggins - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by David Wiggins.
    In this book, which thoroughly revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance, David Wiggins retrieves and refurbishes in the light of twentieth-century logic and logical theory certain conceptions of identity, of substance and of persistence through change that philosophy inherits from its past. In this new version, he vindicates the absoluteness, necessity, determinateness and all or nothing character of identity against rival conceptions. He defends a form of essentialism that he calls individuative essentialism, and then a form (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   180 citations  
  • The Source Of Necessity.Bob Hale - 2002 - Noûs 36 (s16):299-319.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   49 citations  
  • Unified Foundations for Essence and Ground.Kit Fine - 2015 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (2):296-311.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   114 citations  
  • The Construction of Logical Space.Agustín Rayo - 2013 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Our conception of logical space is the set of distinctions we use to navigate the world. Agustn Rayo argues that this is shaped by acceptance or rejection of 'just is'-statements: e.g. 'to be composed of water just is to be composed of H2O'. He offers a novel conception of metaphysical possibility, and a new trivialist philosophy of mathematics.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   156 citations  
  • Senses of Essence.Kit Fine - 1995 - In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Diana Raffman & Nicholas Asher (eds.), Modality, morality, and belief: essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 53-73.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   155 citations  
  • Varieties of Necessity.Kit Fine - 2002 - In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 253-281.
    It is argued that there are three main forms of necessity --the metaphysical, the natural and the normative--and that none of them is reducible to the others or to any other form of necessity. In arguing for a distinctive form of natural necessity, it is necessary to refute a version of the doctrine of scientific essentialism; and in arguing for a distinctive form of normative necessity, it is necessary to refute certain traditional and contemporary versions of ethical naturalism.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   159 citations  
  • The extent of metaphysical necessity.Daniel Nolan - 2011 - Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1):313-339.
    A lot of philosophers engage in debates about what claims are “metaphysically necessary”, and a lot more assume with little argument that some classes of claims have the status of “metaphysical necessity”. I think we can usefully replace questions about metaphysical necessity with five other questions which each capture some of what people may have had in mind when talking about metaphysical necessity. This paper explains these five other questions, and then discusses the question “how much of metaphysics is metaphysically (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • The limits of contingency.Gideon Rosen - 2006 - In Fraser MacBride (ed.), Identity and modality. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 13--39.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   97 citations  
  • How things might have been: individuals, kinds, and essential properties.Penelope Mackie - 2006 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    A novel treatment of an issue central to much current work in metaphysics: the distinction between the essential and accidental properties of individuals. Mackie challenges widely held views, and arrives at what she calls "minimalist essentialism," an unorthodox theory according to which ordinary individuals have relatively few interesting essential properties. Mackie's clear and accessible discussions of issues surrounding necessity and essentialism mean that the book will appeal as much to graduate students as it will to seasoned metaphysicians.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   96 citations  
  • Essence and modality.Kit Fine - 1994 - Philosophical Perspectives 8 (Logic and Language):1-16.
    It is my aim in this paper to show that the contemporary assimilation of essence to modality is fundamentally misguided and that, as a consequence, the corresponding conception of metaphysics should be given up. It is not my view that the modal account fails to capture anything which might reasonably be called a concept of essence. My point, rather, is that the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity is not to be understood in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   942 citations  
  • Of identity and diversity (book II, chapter XXVII).John Locke - 1689 - In An essay concerning human understanding. New York: Oxford University Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   313 citations  
  • (1 other version)Identity and necessity.Saul A. Kripke - 1971 - In Milton Karl Munitz (ed.), Identity and individuation. New York,: New York University Press. pp. 135-164.
    are synthetic a priori judgements possible?" In both cases, i~thas usually been t'aken for granted in fife one case by Kant that synthetic a priori judgements were possible, and in the other case in contemporary,'d-". philosophical literature that contingent statements of identity are ppss. ible. I do not intend to deal with the Kantian question except to mention:ssj~".
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   435 citations  
  • Real Definitions.Fabrice Correia - 2017 - Philosophical Issues 27 (1):52-73.
    I offer and defend an account of real definitions. I put forward two versions of the account, one formulated in terms of the notion of generalised identity and of a suitable notion of grounding, and the other one formulated in terms of the former notion and of a suitable notion of comparative joint-carvingness. Given a plausible assumption, and turn out to be equivalent. I give a sketch of a unified account of the three notions involved in and from which the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   51 citations  
  • What is the Source of Our Knowledge of Modal Truths?E. J. Lowe - 2012 - Mind 121 (484):919-950.
    There is currently intense interest in the question of the source of our presumed knowledge of truths concerning what is, or is not, metaphysically possible or necessary. Some philosophers locate this source in our capacities to conceive or imagine various actual or non-actual states of affairs, but this approach is open to certain familiar and seemingly powerful objections. A different and ostensibly more promising approach has been developed by Timothy Williamson, according to which our capacity for modal knowledge is just (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   110 citations  
  • Locke on Real Essence and Water as a Natural Kind: A Qualified Defence.E. J. Lowe - 2011 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1):1-19.
    ‘Water is H2O’ is one of the most frequently cited sentences in analytic philosophy, thanks to the seminal work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam in the 1970s on the semantics of natural kind terms. Both of these philosophers owe an intellectual debt to the empiricist metaphysics of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while disagreeing profoundly with Locke about the reality of natural kinds. Locke employs an intriguing example involving water to support his view that kinds (or ‘species’), such (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Response to Fabrice Correia.Kit Fine - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (1):85–88.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • The conceivability of naturalism.Crispin Wright - 2002 - In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 401--439.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • (1 other version)Two Kinds of Possibility.Dorothy Edgington - 2004 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1):1-22.
    I defend a version of Kripke's claim that the metaphysically necessary and the knowable a priori are independent. On my version, there are two independent families of modal notions, metaphysical and epistemic, neither stronger than the other. Metaphysical possibility is constrained by the laws of nature. Logical validity, I suggest, is best understood in terms of epistemic necessity.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   48 citations  
  • Modality, Sparsity, and Essence.Nathan Wildman - 2013 - Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253):760-782.
    Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter‐examples which purport to show that attempts to understand essence in terms of metaphysical necessity are ‘fundamentally misguided’. Here, my aim is to put forward a new version of modalism that is, I argue, immune to Fine's counter‐examples. The core of this new modalist account is a sparseness restriction, such that an object's essential properties are those sparse properties it has in every world in which it exists. After first motivating this sparseness (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   64 citations  
  • (1 other version)The identity of individuals in a strict functional calculus of second order.Ruth C. Barcan - 1947 - Journal of Symbolic Logic 12 (1):12-15.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   62 citations  
  • Martha Kneale on Why Metaphysical Necessities Are Not A Priori.Jessica Leech - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (4):389-409.
    In her 1938 paper ‘Logical and Metaphysical Necessity’, Martha Kneale introduces the necessarya posteriori. I present a critical summary of Kneale's argument that so-called ‘metaphysical propositions’ are necessary but nota priori. I argue that Kneale is well placed to offer a template for reconciling conceivability approaches to modal epistemology with the post-Kripkean trend for taking metaphysical necessities to have their source in mind-independent reality.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Counter-conceivability again.Crispin Wright - 2018 - In Ivette Fred Rivera & Jessica Leech (eds.), Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • (1 other version)The Inaugural Address: Two Kinds of Possibility.Dorothy Edgington - 2004 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78:1-22.
    I defend a version of Kripke's claim that the metaphysically necessary and the knowable a priori are independent. On my version, there are two independent families of modal notions, metaphysical and epistemic, neither stronger than the other. Metaphysical possibility is constrained by the laws of nature. Logical validity, I suggest, is best understood in terms of epistemic necessity.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  • (1 other version)Sameness and Substance Renewed.David Wiggins - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (2):456-461.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   146 citations  
  • (1 other version)Sameness and Substance Renewed.David Wiggins - 2001 - Philosophy 79 (307):133-141.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   183 citations  
  • Brutal Individuation.Allan Hazlett - 2010 - In New Waves in Metaphysics. Palgrave-Macmillan.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations