What are the essential properties of ordinary individuals such as people, cats, trees, and tables? The question is notoriously difficult, yet must be answered to obtain a satisfying account of the ways in which such individuals could and could not have been different from the way that they are. The book provides a novel treatment of this issue, in the context of a set of debates initiated by the revival of interest in essentialism and de re modality generated by the work of Kripke and others in the 1970s. Via a critical examination of rival theories, it argues for ‘minimalist essentialism’: an unorthodox theory according to which ordinary individuals have relatively few interesting essential properties. The book therefore presents a challenge to stronger versions of essentialism, including the view that ordinary individuals have non-trivial individual essences; versions of Kripke’s necessity of origin thesis; and the widely held theory of ‘sortal essentialism’, according to which an individual belongs essentially to some sort or kind that determines its conditions for identity over time. The book includes discussion of the rivalry between the interpretation of de re modality in terms of identity across possible worlds and its interpretation in terms of counterpart theory. It provides a detailed defence of the apparently paradoxical claim that there can be possible worlds that differ from one another only in the identities of some of the individuals that they contain, and hence that identities across possible worlds may be ‘bare’ identities. The book also contains a discussion of the relation between essentialism about individuals and essentialism about natural kinds, and a critical examination of the connection between semantics and natural kind essentialism.
In his hugely influential paper “Essence and Modality” (1994), Kit Fine argued that the then orthodox view that essence can be understood in terms of metaphysical modality is fundamentally flawed. He proposed, in its place, the view that all metaphysical modality has its source in the essences or natures of things, where the notion of a thing’s essence or nature can be understood in terms of a broadly Aristotelian notion of real definition. This theory appears to require that the relevant conception of real definition can itself be isolated without appeal to metaphysical modality. I argue that this requirement cannot be met. I then briefly consider the implications of my argument for the relation between essence and metaphysical modality.
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