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Can “Essence” be a Scientific Term?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Jack Kaminsky
Jack Kaminsky*
Affiliation:
Harpur College, State University of New York
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Extract

In a recent paper Copi has argued for the admission of the term “essence” into scientific terminology. His primary reason is that the increasing adequacy of scientific theories is evidence of a gradual approximation to the real essences of things. Copi is aware that the laws of modern science are not to be taken as formulations of essences. But, he claims, “that is an ideal towards which science strives… Centuries hence wiser men will have radically different and more adequate theories, and their notions will be closer approximations than ours to the real essences of things.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , April 1957 , pp. 173 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © 1957, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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References

1 Irving M. Copi, “Essence and Accident,” The Journal of Philosophy, LI(1954), 706–719.

2 Ibid., p. 718.

3 See, for example, Wild's comment, “To know … there must be not merely a similarity, but an identity between what is in the object and what is in the mind. Otherwise knowledge is impossible.” John Wild, Introduction to Realistic Philosophy, Harper & Brothers, N. Y., 1948, p. 446.

4 See Harold H. Joachim, The Nature of Truth, Second Edition, Oxford University Press, 1939, pp. 7ff.

5 Pascual Jordan, “Die Herkunft der Sterne,” Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1947. See also Henry Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., N. Y., 1950, pp. 408ff.

6 Philebus, 15, Fowler translation.

7 Ibid.

8 Republic, VII, 527, Jowett translation.

9 De Divination Per Somnum, II, 463b, 14. References to Aristotle are from the Oxford translation.

10 Physica, II, 199b, 25.

11 II, 338b, Note 1.

12 Metaphysica, 993a, 17–20.

13 Metaphysica, 1026a, 13.

14 Categories, 4b, 20ff; Metaphysica, 1020a, 7–14.

15 For the same reasons Dewey rejected the use of the term. For all practical purposes the Aristotelian essence never lent itself to measurement, nor was it compatible with the scientific belief that all warranted generalizations are corrigible.

16 See R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation, Cambridge at the University Press, 1953, Chapter X.