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Essential Properties and Individual Essences
Author(s) -
RocaRoyes Sonia
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
philosophy compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.973
H-Index - 25
ISSN - 1747-9991
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2010.00364.x
Subject(s) - property (philosophy) , essentialism , socrates , object (grammar) , relation (database) , epistemology , accidental , computer science , psychology , philosophy , artificial intelligence , physics , data mining , acoustics
According to Essentialism , an object’s properties divide into those that are essential and those that are accidental. While being human is commonly thought to be essential to Socrates, being a philosopher plausibly is not. We can motivate the distinction by appealing – as we just did – to examples. However, it is not obvious how best to characterize the notion of essential property , nor is it easy to give conclusive arguments for the essentiality of a given property. In this paper, I elaborate on these issues and explore the way in which essential properties behave in relation to other related properties, like sufficient‐for‐existence properties and individual essences .