Friday, April 11, 2008

The Plague of Predicative Essentialism

I can't accept any theory that posits the essence of an object to be comprised of, or reducible to a set of properties.

The essence of an object is that from which all the properties of an object flow.

The following is an appropriate picture: An infinite amount of essences exist, none differing solo numero and all being in the company of one another. Their being present to one another results in each of them contributing to a relational situs wherein each of the essences exhibit some set of characteristics resulting from the relationship of it to every other essence in its presence. Each essence is, in virtue of its particular relationship to every other object, clothed in a certain quiddity comprised of a total set of properties. Objects are hylomorphic - equally essence and properties, haecceity and suchness, non-qualitative and qualitative, individual and communal, non-relational and relational.

Any account wherein properties are considered primitive must view the essence of an object as ineffectually inactive or else a derivative entity. But such an account cannot explain how these properties can be their own de re foundation or how they can set a non-trivial limit to and specification of the property possession of an object. In short, the effects of primitivising properties is that all investigation of the nature of objects must be left to logical analysis. Possibility will be nothing more than non-contradiction between the predicates of an object and the predicates comprising some conceptual context. Necessity will be merely the impossibility of non-contradiction between the predicates of an object and the predicates comprising some conceptual context. But diamonds and boxes are only conceptual aids.

Real possibility flows from the essence of an object - it declares a property possible just in case the property is compossible with every other property in some conceptual context and there is some property that the object has from which, if it were to be included in this context,it would follow that the property in question would be exemplified. This is the real character of Leibnizian worlds - one which respects the pregnancy of properties with determinate properties founded in the relationship of the 'concept' of the object in respect to every other object.

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