Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The essential properties of a thing, collectively called its essence , are those of its properties that it must have so long as it exists at all; they are the properties that the thing would have in any possible world. The accidental properties of a thing, by contrast, are those of its properties that it could exist without. If you heat a piece of wax (to use a famous example from D escartes's Meditations ), it loses its hardness and its previous shape, but continues to exist, thereby showing that those properties were accidental to it. But the property of being extended or spread out in space is, according to Descartes, essential to the wax: to think of the wax as no longer being extended is to think of it as no longer existing at all. The notion of essence as just introduced must not be confused with another that sometimes misleadingly goes by the same name. When it is a necessary truth that all K s are L s, people sometimes speak of K s as being essentially L s, or of L-hood as being an essential property of K s. This is only to say that any K must be an L if it is to remain a K ; it is not necessarily to say that any K must be an L if it is to continue to exist at all. For example, it is a necessary truth that all sprinters are two-legged; but this does not imply that a given sprinter could not lose a leg. Unfortunately, he could – in which event he would ... log in or subscribe to read full text