I’ve mentioned my work on the epistemology of essence several times, and I gave a talk with that title at NYU already last spring. Since then I’ve been slowly chipping away at the draft that I had, with the help of a number comments I’ve gotten (thanks a lot for those everyone, I’ll make sure to mention you when the paper finds a home). Anyway, the draft has inflated into a near 12.000 word essay; and there’s a lot more that I’d like to say about the topic! I’m giving a talk here at Chapel Hill in just ten days with the same title, so hopefully something useful will come out of that too, but I think that the current draft is not too bad, and I’m about to start shopping around with it. Any reactions are of course more than welcome. The draft is available here.

The starting point of this paper is the Aristotelian idea that essence is ontologically prior to modality. This has been popularized by Kit Fine in particular, but the view has been defended by E. J. Lowe, David S. Oderberg, and Kathrin Koslicki as well, among others. In the paper I try to shed some light on the neglected topic of the epistemology of essence understood in the Aristotelian fashion, giving a survey of the options that have been defended — or hinted towards — in the literature, as well as trying to see whether there are some options that have not been researched at all.

I identify for major options, listed in the table below. Central to my discussion is the apparent link between modality and essence — the classic, ‘modalist’ Kripke-Putnam picture suggesting that the latter should be analysed in terms of the former. I think it’s obvious that there is a link between the two, as even in the Aristotelian tradition necessity is considered to be a necessary [sic] criterion for essentiality, or, perhaps better: essentiality entails necessity, even though necessity does not entail essentiality. So, it is key to explicate the relationship between essence and modality.

The two decisions that determine the options are whether essence is epistemologically prior to modality, and whether our access to it is a posteriori or a priori. This does not rule out a hybrid view, but I’m mostly interested in unitary accounts in this paper. So, the important thing to see is that even though essence is ontologically prior to modality, this does not entail that the epistemic order of explanation has to be the same. In fact, maintaining that modality is epistemically prior to essence is an option that has been almost entirely neglected amongst those who accept Fine’s reduction of metaphysical modality to essence (and the Aristotelian picture of essence).

After a detailed discussion of Lowe’s, Oderberg’s, and Fine’s views on essence, and placing them in the appropriate cells of the above table, I conclude by defending my own view, which is that the epistemic route to essence is via our a priori access to metaphysical modality. Go ahead and read the full paper! I’ll probably also post a link to my slides after the forthcoming talk at Chapel Hill.