Real Essences Research Articles

"Wholly Useless and Unserviceable to Knowledge"

In this paper I examine Locke’s criticism of the view that some species of natural objects are determined by real essences, a view I call species realism. Most commentators have focused either on Locke’s putative objections to the realist’s claim that species determining real essences exist or on his semantic case against the assumption that our species terms can refer to real essences that determine species. I identify another objection, which, I argue, is independent from both of these lines of criticism. This objection is essentially practical. It is based on the claim that adopting species realism has detrimental practical consequences: it undermines, Locke believes, our ability to sort particular natural objects into species. This alone, he argues, is already sufficient to set aside and ignore species realism when trying to sort objects into species.

Kant's regulative essentialism and the unknowability of real essences

AbstractIn his lectures on Logic and Metaphysics, Kant distinguishes between logical and real essences. While the former is related to concepts and is knowable, the latter is related to things and is unknowable. In this paper, I argue that the unknowability is explained by the modal characteristic of real essences as a necessitating ground on which a priori knowledge is impossible. I also show how this claim is related to the unknowable necessity of particular laws of nature. Since laws of nature are conceived as grounded in real essences, the unknowability of the latter is equivalent to Kant's other claim that there can be no knowledge of the necessity of particular laws of nature. Necessity can only be known a priori, and therefore, the necessity of particular laws is only assumed and conceived as grounded in something unknowable, a real essence. This conclusion will allow me to attribute to Kant a position I label as “regulative essentialism”, meaning that real essences have an indispensable role in accordance with the rational interest to explain nature as a system of laws and natural kinds, combined with an epistemic humility about the correspondence of our empirical concepts to real essences.

‘Facing the Sun’: Nature and Nation in Franco’s ‘New Spain’ (1936–51)

This article examines the relation between nation and nature in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and post-war years. As in other European cases of fascist and parafascist regimes, the Francoist regime mobilised nature for political and nationalistic goals. Spanish nature embodied the essences of the ‘true Spain’ and was seen as key to the regeneration of the country. The regime assumed an agrarian discourse that identified the countryside and nature with the real essences of the nation. It adopted autarkic political, social and economic directives, closing the country upon itself in order to regenerate and purge away its sins, but also confident that the nation’s nature was the basis for building a new empire.

Pojęcie ciała. Stanowisko Johna Locke’a

The article reconstructs the concept of body in the philosophy of John Locke; body is understood in a twofold sense: as a part of nature and as belonging to my own unique experience. Several threads interweave in the way Locke understands body: the historical method presenting the shaping of empirical concepts within human experience, the epistemological pessimism concerning the knowledge of real essences, and philosophical explication of religious truths which allows Locke to give his own interpretation of resurrection: the resurrection of bodies but not of souls, if they are to be understood as a substance independent from body. The analyses carried out on various planes: psychological description of human experience, natural philosophy, metaphysics and the philosophy of religion reveal the extent to which Locke’s philosophy is rooted in Cartesianism and shows how his empiricism overcomes it.

A Call to Focus on Racial Domination and Oppression: A Response to “Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Poverty and Affluence, 1959–2015″

In this essay, I respond to Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Poverty and Affluence, 1959–2015 (hereafter Racial and Ethnic Inequality). I argue that Racial and Ethnic Inequality does not fully explain racial inequality in poverty and affluence—particularly among black Americans and American Indians compared to white Americans—because the manuscript follows conventional approaches to the study of racial inequality that obscure racial domination and oppression in the US. These conventional approaches include (1) highlighting the racial gap in a given outcome without conceptualizing and historicizing the social construction of race, (2) theorizing human capital as race-neutral to account for racial inequality, and (3) employing data analyses that reflect analytic bifurcation, which treat racial groups as real essences, monolithic, and position white Americans as the standard against which people of color are measured. These conventional approaches are not unique to Racial and Ethnic Inequality. My goal is to use Racial and Ethnic Inequality as an illustrative example of how conventional approaches address the idea of “race” in sociological research, and whether these approaches provide readers with the most optimal ways to understand racial inequality in the US. I make several recommendations to move research on racial inequality forward. My intention is to spark a conversation about what can be considered “best practices” in addressing the role of race in racial inequality research.

Theatrical art: The Mysteriality of theatrical art as a "formula" of the expression of the depth and immeasurability of human existence

The purpose of the research is to broaden the field of understanding of the mysterious foundations of the theatrical art from the point of view of the unity of meanings that are in the process of constant birth, growth, transformation and replacement by new relatively complete disclosure of transcendental and meaningfulness as complete mutual penetration, free solidarity of spiritual and material, ideal and real essences. T he methodological basis of the research is the fundamental philosophical-theoretical and cultural tradition of Western European and Russian thought, including the development of consciousness in the general process of cultural and historical life in its deepest foundations: through the transformation of life-meaning, and the idea of the mystery is interpreted as interpreting the value-essential layers and aspects of being. The comprehension of the mystery from the point of view of the transgressive essence is a substantial center around which the study of its spiritual dimensions, nature, dialectics, Methodological research strategy tends to the synthesis of cultural, art and axiological approaches, providing for the expansion of analysts' optics, understanding of the deep semantic structure of the mystery. Scientific novelty consists in the substantiation of the semantic organization of the mysterial structure, its value-content characteristics in the context of the art-cultural and cultural aspects of existence and manifestation of the mysterial, which allows us to identify the energy-form-forming components of it. The conclusions: the primacy of the spiritual over the empirically concrete appears as the axiology of the conceptual substantiations of the mystery, which can serve as the paradigm of the ascent of man to the desired point where God, where the Spirit, where there is some, lying outside the unfolding of the metaphysical space in which new layers are opened creating meanings , building awareness of their place in the world and a correct understanding of how to be to appear as a person.

Lockean superaddition and Lockean humility

This paper offers a new approach to an old debate about superaddition in Locke. Did Locke claim that some objects have powers that are unrelated to their natures or real essences? The question has split commentators. Some (Wilson, Stuart, Langton) claim the answer is yes and others (Ayers, Downing, Ott) claim the answer is no. This paper argues that both of these positions may be mistaken. I show that Locke embraced a robust epistemic humility. This epistemic humility includes ignorance of the real essences of bodies, of the causal processes underlying the production of natural phenomena, and of God's method of creation. I show how this epistemic humility offers strong support for an agnostic response to the question of superaddition. Locke did not intend to claim that bodies either do or do not have properties unrelated to their real essences. Instead, his primary goal in discussing the topic was to emphasize the strict limits to human knowledge.

Locke's Species: Money and Philosophy in the 1690s

Summary John Locke intervened in two major debates in which the issue of species featured: (1) the question of whether species designations are based on real essences or only nominal essences (discussed in the Essay), and (2) the debate over the recoinage of English currency in the 1690s, in which Locke argued for a restoration of silver depleted by widescale clipping (discussed in his economic writings published between 1692–95). This article investigates Locke's position on the recoinage and considers alternative proposals in the period, including those which advocated the introduction of a ‘new species’ of money in the form of credit, based on land. Locke opened the space, philosophically, for innovations in defining money, but endorsed a narrower conception of money as silver by weight alone (not by its stamp or denomination). His rationale for doing so exposes his attachment to shared systems of measurement, intersubjective agreement and ways of stabilizing meaning by reference to external criteria (in this case, the weight of silver, a measure that functioned internationally). This suggests a pattern of attempting to constrain the nominalism that his system otherwise foregrounded.

Francisco suárez on the object of the metaphysics

For Su?rez, the object of the metaphysics is being insofar as it is real being (ens reale). In order to explain this, the author analyzes Su?rez?s notions of formal and objective concept (conceptus formalis, conceptus objectivus). Su?rez finds that the primary feature of the objective concept of being is its unity; nevertheless that does not imply the univocal concept of being because the objective concept of being is applied on its instances on diverse ways. When considering what is being (ens), Su?rez makes the difference between being taken as a noun and being taken as a participle. The later one signifies everything actually existing; being as a noun signifies everything which have the real essence (essentia realis), with actual existence or without it. The real essence he defines as something that is not repugnant to actual existence and which is not a figment of mind. The objective concept of being is a result of precisive abstraction and encompass all real essences, actual as well as non-actual. As such, for Su?rez, it is the object of the metaphysics as a science.

Philosophy of chemistry as intercultural philosophy: Jaap van Brakel

After a brief biography of Jaap van Brakel we set out his appropriation and use of the distinction between the manifest image and the scientific image of the world. In a certain sense van Brakel gives priority to the manifest image as the ultimate source of meaning in chemical discourses. He does not take sides in the debate about nominal and real essences, twin earths and so, but presents a compromise. As an active practitioner of the chemical arts he emphasises the indispensability of models as a main tool for chemical thinking. We then turn to van Brakel’s interest in forging an intercultural point of view in which philosophy of chemistry plays an important part.

What is more puzzling, real essences or the world of undifferentiated stuff?

What is more puzzling, real essences or the world of undifferentiated stuff?

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Essentialism

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Essentialism

Locke on Real Essences, Intelligibility, and Natural Kinds

In this paper I criticize the interpretations of John Locke on natural kinds offered by Matthew Stuart and Pauline Phemister who argue that Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding allows for natural kinds based on similar real essences. By contrast, I argue for a conventionalist reading of Locke by reinterpreting his account of the status of real essences within the Essay and arguing that Locke denies that the new science of mechanism can justify the claim that similarities in corpuscular structure imply similarities in sensible qualities. I argue further that Locke rejects as meaningless any talk of kinds that appeals to similarities among real essences. On my reading of Locke, similarities in real essences are not only irrelevant to species, but natural kind theories based on them are unintelligible.

Wordsworth amongst the Aristotelians

Critics have ignored scholastic Aristotelianism as a possible source for WordsworthÕs philosophical outlook on the related areas of metaphysics and cognitive theory. Without denying fundamental orientations towards both empiricism and Platonism on these issues, I argue that Wordsworth also has much in common with the Aristotelians who debated with Locke. Wordsworth accepts, as these thinkers do, the passivity not just of sensation but of knowledge of objects external to the mind, and he believes that there are real essences. In common with the Aristotelian rejection of Platonism, these essences are held to be immanent in things.

Lockean Essences, Political Posturing, and John Toland’s Reading of Isaac Newton’s Principia

This article exposes the theological, political and epistemological foundations for the early natural philosophy of the deist John Toland (1670-1722). Toland is best known for Christianity not Mysterious (1696), which borrowed much from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Specifically, Toland employed the distinction between nominal and real essences to claim that God provided humanity the capacity to know only the nominal essences of the created world. This belief informed Toland’s philosophy of nature, which he first advanced in Letters to Serena (1704). There, he argued that all parts of the universe were in motion. Additionally, motion was part of the definition of matter and was, therefore, an aspect of its nominal essence. No further knowledge of the Creation was possible because the cause of motion was an unknowable real essence. Lockean and theological commitments explain Toland’s peculiar reading of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which has long attracted interest from historians of science. A theological motivation for Toland’s worldview sheds new light on the underlying assumptions of his natural philosophy and on English deism more generally. It suggests that deists did have theological convictions and that these must figure prominently in any study.

The Intelligibility of the Universe

Hume famously warned us that the ‘[The] ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry’. Or, again, Newton: ‘Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity … and I frame no hypotheses.’ Aristotelian science was concerned with just such questions, the specification of occult qualities, the real essences that answer the question What is matter, etc?, the preoccupation with circular definitions such as dormative virtues, and so on. The rise of modern science is usually seen as a break with the sterility of Aristotelianism, so what exactly is it that modern science does discover, if it is not the essential nature of matter, of force, of energy, of space and time? A famous answer was provided by Poincaré: ‘The true relations between these real objects are the only reality we can attain.’ This is often regarded as the manifesto of so-called structural realism, as espoused in recent years by John Worrall, for example (cp. his (1989)). In response to the arguments of Larry Laudan (1982) against convergent realism, Worrall points to the continuity in the formal relations between elements of reality expressed by mathematical equations, while the intrinsic nature of these elements of reality gets constantly revised.

Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa

This paper is an analysis of state practice in respect of racial classification and its epistemological underpinnings in twentieth-century South Africa. It shows how apartheid racial categories—drawing heavily on those enacted by the segregationist state—were wielded as instruments of surveillance and control by a state animated by fantasies of omniscience as much as omnipotence. The architects of apartheid racial classification policies recognized explicitly that racial categories were constructs, rather than descriptions of real essences—a version of the idea of race which enabled the bureaucratization of “common sense” notions of racial difference and which contributed direcdy to the enormous powers wielded by racial classifiers. If constructs, these categories were powerfully rooted in the materiality of everyday life. The ubiquity of the state's racial designations, and the extent to which they meshed with lived hierarchies of class and status, meant that apartheid's racial grid was strongly imprinted in the subjective experience of race.

The Theism of William Drummond

There is no doubt that Sir William Drummond, whose boo~ Academical Questions, published in 1805,was highly praised by Shelley,! was a sceptic in the classical tradition. This was shown by C. E. Pulos in his study of Shelley's scepticism, and has been confirmed by Terence Allan Hoagwood in a work which, among other things, corrects a misunderstanding about classical scepticism which prevailed at the time when Pulos and those who followed him wrote about Shelley's indebtedness to Drummond, Hume and their predecessors. The misunderstanding consisted in a confusion of the concept of probability as an approach to truth with probabile, which was Cicero's translation of to pithanon, meaning the persuasive and therefore having to do not with objective truth but only with belief.2 This is confirmed in a recent study by R. J. Hankinson. But a difference between ancient and modern scepticism, which Hankinson points out, is that the former was a scepticism of real properties or essences but not of existences,3 and so was less destructive than the Humean scepticism which Drummond and Shelley inherited. Drummond and Shelley doubted claims to knowledge not only of the natures and properties of external objects but also of their existence, but dogmatic denial of the existence of matter was no more possible on the sceptical basis of their thought than dogmatic affirmation of the existence of God. Yet Drummond, unlike Shelley, believed in God. Hugh Roberts has remarked that Hoagwood ignores Drummond's 'fideist theism' ,jideism being the name usually applied to a religious faith maintained on a sceptical basis.4

The Status of Mechanism in Locke's Essay

The prominent place of corpuscularian mechanism in Locke's Essay is nowadays universally acknowledged.' Certainly, Locke's discussions of the primary/secondary quality distinction and of real essences cannot be understood without reference to the corpuscuLarian science of his day, which held that all macroscopic bodily phenomena should be explained in terms of the motions and impacts of submicroscopic particles, or corpuscles, each of which can be fully characterized in terms of a strictly limited range of (primary) properties: size, shape, motion (or mobility), and, perhaps, solidity or impenetrability. Indeed, Locke's lists of primary quali-

Reference and Natural Kind Termas: The Real Essence of Locke's View

J. L. Mackie's famous claim that Locke ‘anticipates’ Kripke's Causal Theory of Reference (CTR) rests, I suggest, upon a pair of important misunderstandings. Contra Mackie, as well as the more recent accounts of Paul Guyer and Michael Ayers, Lockean Real Essences consist of those features of an entity from which all of its experienceable properties can be logically deduced; thus a substantival Real Essence consists of features of a Real Constitution plus logically necessary objective connections between them and features of some particular Nominal Essence. Furthermore, what Locke actually anticipates is the most significant contemporary challenge to the CTR: the qua‐problem.