Essences, Kinds, Universals
The chapter provides an account of essences according to which essences are not entities, but what it is to be a kind of entity or to be a particular entity of its kind. To grasp something’s essence is to have a sense of what it takes to be the kind of entity it is. Thinking about Bunkin as a rabbit requires having some conception of what it takes to be a rabbit. Trivially, everything is what it is, everything, however outlandish, has what it takes to be whatever it is. Essences might be thought to play the role of universals. Were that so, universals would be metaphysically unremarkable, and not a species of general entity, a thought in keeping with a conception of properties as modes. The chapter introduces the notion of ‘slippage’ in the course of discussing attempts by philosophers to align the manifest and scientific images.