Essence

Comments (8)

1. I have a fondness for Mr Jevons, too!

2. Still pissed off at Aristotle?

   🙂

3. For ancient scholastic word, it continues to see substantial modern usage. I wonder though, if some related old “useless” words are any more meaningful – such as haecceity, quiddity, hypokeimenon, and maybe even noumenon. Haecceity, at least to me, is a word that has no modern counterpart (“identity” is perhaps the closest).

   1. Attempts to translate the scholastic vocab into English often show the vapidity of some of the terms: haeccity – thisness, qualia – how-it-is-to-be, quiddity – thatness. It is fairly clear to me that most of these terms are largely meaningless.

      Not because the schoalstics were stupid; far from it. They were trying to make use of Aristotelian hylomorphism to deal with aspects of the world. The problem lies in the metaphysics. It’s like the Trinitarian terminology: empty words that look deep to cover up the fact that the underlying ideas are incoherent.

      The problem with essence is twofold:

      1. It is ambiguous. It can mean “what makes it what it is” or it can mean “necessary and sufficient definienda” or it can mean “necessary properties” and so on. These are all distinct issues and ideas.

      2. It is basically elaborated folk taxonomy; and as such has no deep meaning.

      The reason why we still use the term after Dalton is unclear to me. I think Russell must bear a lot of the blame. Hegel too, but as he’s much earlier we can allow him some slack. Not his followers. Heidegger should have been enclosed in a small room for life.

   2. I agree on the ambiguity of essence – it could mean almost anything. Not so much on the other words, though. They may not be terribly useful words today, but still somewhat meaningful. Quiddity is vaguely type or class, haecceity is vaguely instance or identity. Hypokeimenon refers to the concept of a substance or set of properties that persist through change (I can’t think of a modern counterpart offhand). And we’ll have to disagree on qualia – probably the most often used after essence. The meaning is fairly clear to me, at least as it is used today.

      1. “Trope” might be roughly what Hypokeimenon means in modern metaphysics. As to qualia, the entire argument for their existence seems to me to rely on “I know what it is but I can’t put it into words”. To me that spells word salad.

         The other terms: haeccity and quiddity. Yes they are vague but useful, but a proper analysis results in their being about distinctness and differentiation, indexing, and as you say, identity. They can be replaced without loss.

         But, and I state this forcefully, I am not a metaphysician, nor do I play one on the internet. I am only concerned with the metaphysics needed to account for science, and in particular, biology, which makes my concerns a lot smaller than the real thing.

4. Have you ever considered the Istigkeit of ‘Je ne sais quoi’ recently?

   1. That suggestion has a certain…. never mind.

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