Thematic Distinction Between Essence And Existence

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, , language: English, abstract: The terms essence and existence have dominated philosophical discussions for centuries, at least from the era of Plato up to the contemporary times. The central issue at the heart of this discourse in the preliminary stage had to do with the question of what actually makes an essence of an existing entity. For example, if you say God, philosophers will probe further to ask: what is the essence of God? In other words, ‘what are those characteristics that are truly exclusive to God? If, again, you say a Satsuma (a type of orange) exists, then one will be prompted to ask as to what features distinguish it from a tangerine. That is, what are those distinctive qualities - essentially immaterial - that will not make me call an existential Satsuma a tangerine? What the inquirer is demanding is simply something more than mere the Satsuma or any of the accidental features like colour, taste, etc. Questions have also been raised in terms of what actually exists as against what is believed to exist. The discourse quickly like wild fire moved from the level of mere conceptualizing the terms to the level of philosophers trying to find out which of essence and existence precedes each other. In other words, granted, at least, at level of assumption that both human and objects exist, philosophers are asking whether their essence precedes their existence. The battle to resolve this crisis of concepts pitted modern Christian philosophers like Bishop George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant against contemporary existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. The former school, led by Berkeley in its submission had argued that essence precedes existence, while the latter, championed by extensively by Sartre disagrees, saying existence precedes essence. However, there are other variations to the discourse but it is sufficient for the scope of this paper to limit discussion to these two, with more emphasis on Sartre.

"This is an exciting book - at least it should be to those who already know something about the Thomistic metaphysics of essence and existence and who are interested in the basic seminal ideas in philosophy." W. Norris Clark, editor of the 'International Philosophical Quarterly,' thus describes Professor Carlo's book in the Preface. He adds that this interpretation of existence would provide metaphysics with the most powerfully unified vision of the world in the whole of Western thought. Impressive in its research and breadth of vision, this study searches into controversies which have plagued the meaning and function of existence from the time of Parmenides. The author is both provocative and controversial, forcing the reader by cogency of argument alone to rethink much of what he already knows and to modify his basic understanding of the problem.Continuing and advancing the thought of Gilson and Maritain, Professor Carlo reduces essence to a model of existence, and matter itself - Merleau-Ponty's "weakness at the heart of being" and Heidegger's "horizon of being" - to a deficiency of being. In a brilliant exposition, touched with grace, skill, and scrupulous fairness, Professor Carlo breaks down the stubborn tradition of Scholasticism's disregard of Aquinas' revolutionary understanding of existence by disentangling fact from fiction and setting the record straight. The author states that the primacy of existence demands as a logical and natural corollary, the subordination of essence to existence, since not only the very existence of essence but all its perfection comes from existence, including that last cherished inheritance of which no one ever thought it could be dispossessed, the very knowability and intelligibility of essence itself. The role of essence as an Aristotelian reciprocal cause or as the extrinsic principle of limitation is revolutionized by the author. Instead, essence arises out of the flood of existence, as a 'mode of existence,' as the 'intrinsic limitation of existence.' Thus the doctrine of the primacy of existence, historically, has served as a "halfway house" to the doctrine of the 'ultimate reducibility of essence to existence."--From cover flaps.

Essays on Existence and Essence presents a series of writings—including several previously unpublished—by Bob Hale on the topics of ontology and modality. The essays develop and consolidate a number of themes central to his work and to contemporary metaphysics, logic, and philosophy of language. They display Hale's innovative approach to some of the most fundamental issues in philosophy, in dialogue (and, in some cases, in collaboration) with other leading philosophers. The notion of a definition is examined as it applies both to words—verbal definitions-and to things—real definitions—and the relations between these are brought out in order to address problems in the metaphysics of necessity and the semantics and epistemology of modality. Hale argues for an essentialist theory of the source of necessity and our knowledge of it, and provides rigorous and inventive responses to problems such a theory might face. This theoretical framework is applied to the recently influential truthmaking approach to semantics and logic, developing an exact truthmaker account of universal quantification and modal statements. Other topics covered include the Fregean theory of ontological categories, the status of second-order logic, the metaphysics of numbers, and the nature of analytic propositions. The volume opens with a substantial introduction by Kit Fine, providing a critical examination of Hale's philosophy, and closes with a complete bibliography of Hale's writings.

Discusses the generic problem of "Christian philosophy" and considers Aquinas's views on the nature and methodology of metaphysics, and on metaphysics of created and uncreated being.

Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas III is Msgr. John Wippel’s third volume dedicated to the metaphysical thought of Thomas Aquinas. After an introduction, this volume of collected essays begins with Wippel’s interpretation of the discovery of the subject of metaphysics by a special kind of judgment (“separation”). In subsequent chapters, Wippel turns to the relationship between faith and reason, exploring what are known as the preambles of faith. This is followed by two chapters on the important contributions by Cornelio Fabro on Aquinas’s distinction between essence and esse and on participation. The volume continues with articles on Aquinas’s view of creation as a preamble of faith, Aquinas’s much-disputed defense of unicity of substantial form in creatures, his account of the separated soul’s natural knowledge, and Aquinas’s understanding of evil in his De Malo 1. The volume concludes with an article comparing Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Godfrey of Fontaines on the metaphysical composition of angelic beings. Most of these issues were disputed during Aquinas’s time by some of his contemporaries, and the proper understanding of each continues to be debated by various students of his thought today. Wippel’s purpose, therefore, is to help clarify our understanding of Aquinas’s thought on each of these topics, a task that requires the careful analysis of primary sources and of secondary literature and attention to the relative chronology of his writing.

Andrea Bottani Massimiliano Carrara Pierdaniele Giaretta What do we do when we do metaphysics? The aim of this introduction is to give a provisional answer to this question, and then to explain the subtitle of the volume. It is easy to observe that when we do meta physics we engage in a linguistic activity, mainly consisting of uttering declarative sentences that are not very clear to most people. That is true, but, of course, it is not very informative. What do we speak of when we do metaphysics? A traditional answer could be: we speak of what things really are, so suggesting that things can appear in a way that is different from the way they really are. So understood, meta physics is about the sense, or the senses, of "real being". A question that immediately arises is whether the sense of being is unique or is different for different types of things. Another question is whether it is possible that something could appear to be, but really not be. Modem analytic metaphysicians usually answer that the sense of being is unique, while acknowledging that there are different kinds of things, and that to say that something could appear to be but really not be is a plain contradiction, unless what is understood is that it could appear to us that there is something having such and such features, but viii Individuals, Essence, and Identity really there is no such a thing.

A new 2024 translation of Martin Heidegger's major work "Being and Time" (Sein und Zeit), originally published in 1927 in multiple publications. This edition contains a new afterword by the Translator, a timeline of Heidegger's life and works, a philosophic index of core Heideggerian concepts and a guide for terminology across 19th and 20th century Existentialists. This translation is designed for readability and accessibility to Heidegger's enigmatic and dense philosophy. Complex and specific philosophic terms are translated as literally as possible and academic footnotes have been removed to ensure easy reading. Being and Time presents a complex philosophical discourse on the nature of being (Sein) and time (Zeit), focusing in particular on the temporal-existentialist concept of Dasein, a term that combines the German words for "to be" (sein) and "there" (da). This classic philosophic work examines the traditional metaphysical understanding of being, arguing that this understanding, typically based on the idea of a constant presence, fails to account for the temporal and existential dimensions of being. Heidegger proposes that an understanding of being requires an analysis of Dasein, which is characterized not only by its existence, but also by its being in the world and its temporal existence. The concept of Dasein is central to the his argument, emphasizing that Dasein is always already situated in a world, and its understanding of being is shaped by its temporal existence. This perspective challenges traditional metaphysical notions of being as static and unchanging, proposing instead that being is fundamentally temporal and connected to human existence and understanding. As the title suggests, Heidegger sees the question of Being as indistinguishable from Time, arguing that Newtonian conceptions of time as a series of now-points are inadequate for understanding the being of Dasein. His Ontochronology argues that the existential and ontological analysis of Dasein reveals a more fundamental concept of time, one that is integral to the structure of Being itself. The text further elaborates on the idea of "thrownness" and several other existentialist themes. Thrownness is one of the three conditions that signifies Dasein's immersion in the world, where it finds itself already entangled in a web of relations and meanings. This "thrownness", combined with Dasein's inherent being-toward-death, underscores the existential condition of human beings, framing their existence as a continual engagement with their own finitude and the possibilities of their being. Heidegger posits that understanding the nature of being requires a fundamental rethinking of both being and time, dogmatically stating that the true nature of being can only be grasped through an understanding of the temporality that characterizes the existence of being.

This book provides a new approach to the intersections between music and philosophy. It features articles that rethink the concepts of musical work and performance from ontological and epistemological perspectives and discuss issues of performing practices that involve the performer’s and listener’s perceptions. In philosophy, the notion of essence has enjoyed a renaissance. However, in the humanities in general, it is still viewed with suspicion. This collection examines the ideas of essence and context as they apply to music. A common concern when thinking of music in terms of essence is the plurality of music. There is also the worry that thinking in terms of essence might be an overly conservative way of imposing fixity on something that evolves. Some contend that we must take into account the varying historical and cultural contexts of music, and that the idea of an essence of music is therefore a fantasy. This book puts forward an innovative approach that effectively addresses these concerns. It shows that it is, in fact, possible to find commonalities among the many kinds of music. The coverage combines philosophical and musicological approaches with bioethics, biology, linguistics, communication theory, phenomenology, and cognitive science. The respective chapters, written by leading musicologists and philosophers, reconsider the fundamental essentialist and contextualist approaches to music creation and experience in light of twenty-first century paradigm shifts in music philosophy.