Essence and Nominalism

This chapter evaluates six proposals essentialists might put forward in response to Quine’s challenge, viz., to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the crossworld identity of individuals: (i) an object’s qualitative character; (ii) matter; (iii) origins; (iv) haecceities; (v) “world-indexed properties”; and (iv) individual forms. It is argued that the first three candidates fail to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the crossworld identity of individuals, while the fourth and fifth criteria arguably do not succeed in meeting Quine’s demand in an explanatorily adequate fashion. On balance, the sixth option, individual forms, therefore deserves to be taken very seriously as a possible response to Quine’s challenge, especially by neo-Aristotelians. Individual forms, moreover, have other explanatory virtues; in particular, they are more likely than their closest competitors to contribute to an explanation of how an object’s de re modal profile follows from facts about its essence.