Narrow essentialism : aliquidditism

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The third lecture reiterated the starting hypotheses and the precautions to be taken: properties, without which we would have no cognitive access to things, are defined essentially by the dispositions and causal powers they exert. On the one hand, there are essential properties and accidental properties - the challenge being: how do we distinguish between them? And on the other, there are also laws. If we want to avoid "pandispositionalism", we have to start from the premise that some properties are not "essentially" dispositional. Finally, there is more than one step from concept to thing: we must not confuse "predicates" and "properties", and we must distinguish between "power" and "properties" by virtue of which things have the powers they have. From here, we have presented the characteristics of narrow essentialism or aliquidditism. The starting point is Avicennian and Scotian. The principle of neutrality and irreducibility of common nature is adopted. Certain metaphysical realities or formalities can be reduced neither to physical supposits nor to conventional names, since their real unity, if indeed discovered by the intellect, is not produced by it. Aliquidditism is not quidditism: there is no primitivehaecceitas (" primitive thisness "). This involves a re-elaboration of the Scotian model: essence is not a static "quiddity", or a substance, or a pure natural species, or a pure bundle of habits, but rather a fundamentally dispositional "aliquid" something. The real source of intelligibility of a thing (" operari sequitur esse ") is not its behavior (too static a conception of essence), but a set ofhabits or general dispositions affecting the way it would tend to behave in certain kinds of circumstances: essence is not intrinsic properties, but conditional and mutual relational or dispositional properties,clusters of causal powers.

We then proceeded to evaluate narrow essentialism or aliquidditism, asking whether it meets the major challenge posed to essentialism: how to distinguish essential, authentic or "rare" properties from accidental or "abundant" properties or simple "Cambridgian changes"? We have shown the superiority of aliquidditism over modalism, quidditism [12] and certain forms of neo-aristotelianism, and finally over causal or relational structuralism, before presenting provisional conclusions and hypotheses to be explored: the "anti-essentialist consensus" is based above all on a substantialist conception of essence. We need to abandon it, and test our new conception in contact with the sciences. We need to be able to show: 1) Why the sciences don't necessarily conflict with essentialism: remember, in particular, the distinction between essentialism applied to individuals and essentialism applied to species. 2) How, on the contrary, aliquidditism provides satisfactory criteria for distinguishing between the accidental and the essential, and enables authentic metaphysical knowledge (as opposed to humiliating, Kantian or Lewisian positions). 3) How it makes possible the (desirable) reconciliation between the "scientific image" and the "manifest image" of the world (Sellars, Meyerson).