From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 24 2003 - 05:19:27 GMT
Erin,
I said to Joe recently:
"The way I'm using essence is in a Lockean kind of way. Locke conceived of
objects as having an essential nature. It was up to us to discover what
this essence was. A discovered essence would basically be something like a
True Definition."
Essence is typically part of a Greek dichotomy that has "accident" as its
dance partner. When hunting down an essence, you want to strip away all of
the accidental features of an object to reach its True Core, its nougat
filled center. A good confectionary example is an M&M. The essence of the
M&M is the chocolaty center; it is only an accident if you eat a red M&M as
opposed to a green one. What makes it an M&M is its chocolate filled core.
Antiessentialist philosophers deny there are essences. They think all
things are relational. They say that the only reason we think that the
essence of an M&M is a chocolaty center is because that's how we happen to
define "M&M." We could just as easily define it in some other
fashion. When we go through moods of redescription and redefinition, other
things in our web of beliefs and desires shift, too. This is because it is
all relational. It is relations all the way down.
Matt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Mar 24 2003 - 05:21:02 GMT