Speaker Series Talk: Tuomas Tahko (Finland)

“The Epistemology of Essence”

Our epistemic access to essence is a topic which has received very little attention. This is partly due to confusion surrounding the notion of essence itself, and partly due to the sheer difficulty of coming up with a plausible account. The starting point of this paper is an Aristotelian conception of essence, familiar from the work of Kit Fine, E. J. Lowe, David S. Oderberg, and others, i.e., essence is ontologically prior to modality. I introduce four options regarding our epistemic access to essence. These fall in two groups: we could gain knowledge about essence either directly, or via modal knowledge. Furthermore, each of these routes to essence could be either a priori or a posteriori (or a combination of the two). The advantages and disadvantages of each approach will be analyzed, and I will ultimately defend the view according to which our epistemic access to essence is via our a priori knowledge of metaphysical modality.