...Travis Butler David Charles, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 410. Cornell University 2002 BOOK REVIEWS the epistemology of the later dialogues might properly described as “holistic” (though not in precisely...

... of inexpressible ignorance. It then develops an alternative model that does better, on which the ignorance consists in a failure to identify something by way of its nature or essence. © 2015 by Cornell University 2015 absolute position essence ignorance know-wh quidditism Sometimes, ignorance...

...Shamik Dasgupta Much recent metaphysics is built around notions such as naturalness, fundamentality, grounding, dependence, essence, and others besides. In this article I raise a problem for this kind of metaphysics, the “problem of missing value.” I survey a number of possible solutions...

... apply the theory of collective abstraction to solve a problem about converse relations. [email protected] © 2022 by Cornell University 2022 structuralism nonrigid structures abstraction generation essence Abstract objects pose a metaphysical problem: What...

... respects (for example, modally or causally), it satisfies this independence-by-nature condition. © 2016 by Cornell University 2016 Descartes substance independence essence causation inherence Less celebrated than Descartes's contributions to epistemology, but no less significant...

... of knowledge acquisition is the backbone of Bronstein's interpretation (6, 119): At stage 1, the inquirer does not know whether the subject-kind S exists and seeks whether it exists (i.e., whether it has an essence). At stage 2, she knows that S exists and seeks what its essence is. At stage 3, she...

... Alternatives Descartes held that modal truths are true in virtue of essences (or “na- tures entities whose existence and features depend on God. To use his 3. By “truth-maker” I mean whatever entity or entities it is in virtue of which modal truths are true. The seventeenth-century philosophers I...

...: that the substantial form plays a part in the essence of a thing. The classic text is Aristotle, Physics 2.3, 194b27, which character- izes the formal cause as “the account of the essence.” Averroes, too, just before offering the distinction mentioned earlier between substantial and accidental forms, remarks...

... of these thinkers. He contends that Aristotle represents them as propounding both “entity monism,” the view that reality consists of just a single entity, and “essence monism,” the view that reality is all of the same essence. In chapter 1, Clarke concludes Aristotle must have understood Parmenides and Melissus...

.... It is common to interpret Descartes as holding that this supreme perfection constitutes God's essence. In chapter 1, Griffin makes an intriguing and original counterproposal: that Descartes treats omnipotence alone as God's principal or essential attribute, one from which all other divine perfections—including...

... is the cause of x. But when things are subject to external causes, their effects must be understood in terms of their powers in conjunction with the powers of those external causes (4p5). Power of acting can thus be understood as admitting of degrees. The more the power or essence of a thing explains...

... that everything must have a cause, Spinoza infers in E1p7 that since a substance cannot be caused by anything else, it must be a cause of itself, or—per the definition of causa sui in E1d1—that it must have a nature, or essence, which necessitates its existence. From the proposition that each substance has...

... basic? Or are we? 391 BOOK REVIEWS Thomas Aquinas, who makes the concepts of existence and essence central to his metaphysics, has especially become the focus of modern discus- sion. Etienne Gilson, in Being and Some...

... BOOK REVIEWS Thomas Aquinas, who makes the concepts of existence and essence central to his metaphysics, has especially become the focus of modern discus- sion. Etienne Gilson, in Being and Some Philosophers,1 tried to show that Thomas added a crucial insight into being that earlier...

... BOOK REVIEWS Thomas Aquinas, who makes the concepts of existence and essence central to his metaphysics, has especially become the focus of modern discus- sion. Etienne Gilson, in Being and Some Philosophers,1 tried to show that Thomas added a crucial insight into being that earlier...

... BOOK REVIEWS Thomas Aquinas, who makes the concepts of existence and essence central to his metaphysics, has especially become the focus of modern discus- sion. Etienne Gilson, in Being and Some Philosophers,1 tried to show that Thomas added a crucial insight into being that earlier...

... basic? Or are we? 391 BOOK REVIEWS Thomas Aquinas, who makes the concepts of existence and essence central to his metaphysics, has especially become the focus of modern discus- sion. Etienne Gilson, in Being and Some...

... sympathetic to the idea that Aristotle devel- oped a causal theory of form or essence rather than a classificatory theory in Book Z, having published my own version of that interpretation a decade ago.2 Wedin’s interpretation makes an important contribution to the causal understanding of form. He does...

... is a member of a given substance kind, dynamic kind, or property kind is determined by whether the particular object, process, or trope possesses the causally intrinsic properties that are essential to the kind. (Note that kind essences are not the same thing as indi- vidual essences. Individual essences...

.... If the individual essences of objects are constituted only by intrinsic categor- ical properties, and it is possible for their dispositional properties to change without accompanying changes in their intrinsic categorical properties, then it would be possible for a particular object to remain the very same...