📄 social_science

The ultimacy of essence

This paper critiques three recent accounts of the ultimacy of essence for failing to provide truly ultimate explanations and proposes a modal account of intrinsicality as a viable alternative.

Original authors: Daniel Neumann

Published 2026-09-04

📖 6 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Daniel Neumann

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

In the quiet corners of philosophy, where thinkers ask what it truly means for something to be itself, a specific kind of question has long held sway. Imagine a scientist examining a drop of water. They can explain its behavior by noting it is made of hydrogen and oxygen. But a philosopher asks a deeper question: why must water be made of these elements? Why is it impossible for water to be anything else? This line of inquiry leads to the concept of "essence." Essence is the idea that every object has a core nature, a set of features that define what it is, without which it would cease to be that thing. If you remove the essence, the object vanishes. For decades, many philosophers believed that explaining something by pointing to its essence was the final stop on the road of understanding. They thought that once you said, "This is water because it is the nature of water to be H2O," you had reached the end of the line. There was no further "why" to ask. This belief in the ultimate, unshakeable power of essence has shaped how we think about reality, necessity, and the very structure of the world.

However, a recent paper by Daniel Neumann from the University of Graz challenges this long-held certainty. Neumann does not argue that essences do not exist, but rather that the way we usually explain them is flawed. He suggests that when we claim an explanation based on essence is the "ultimate" answer, we are actually skipping steps that need to be filled. The paper surveys three different modern attempts to prove that essential explanations are truly final and unanswerable. In each case, Neumann finds a crack in the logic. He argues that these explanations fail to be truly ultimate because they rely on hidden assumptions or circular reasoning that they do not admit. Instead of stopping the inquiry, these explanations actually open the door to further questions about what the essence itself is made of.

The first view Neumann examines comes from a philosopher named Spinelli, who suggests that an essence is ultimate because it is immediately relevant to the object it defines. The idea is that if you ask why Socrates is human, the answer is simply that being human is the most relevant thing to his identity. Spinelli argues that we do not need to ask what "being human" itself is made of to understand Socrates. Neumann points out that this creates a problem. If we truly want to understand Socrates, we must understand what "being human" is. Is it a universal idea shared by all people, or is it a unique, individual piece of reality? The answer changes the nature of Socrates himself. By refusing to ask what the essence is made of, Spinelli's view leaves the explanation incomplete. It pretends to be the end of the road, but it actually stops just short of the real destination.

The second approach, proposed by Wallner and Vaidya, tries to solve the problem by linking essence directly to necessity. They argue that it is simply part of the nature of essence to make things necessary. In their view, if something is essential to an object, it must be true in every possible world where that object exists. They claim this connection is a basic, unexplainable fact, like a rule of the universe that just is. Neumann finds this unsatisfying. He argues that simply stating "essence makes things necessary" does not explain how it happens. It is like saying a key opens a lock because it is a key, without ever describing the shape of the key or the mechanism of the lock. By treating this connection as a primitive, unexplainable axiom, the author avoids the hard work of explaining the nature of essence itself. They claim to have reached the bottom, but Neumann suggests they have only built a wall to stop further digging.

The third view, from Glazier, argues that an explanation is ultimate if you cannot repeat the explanation on itself. For example, it is essential to a single-item set to contain its member. Glazier says it is not essential to the set that the set is essentially a container; the essence stops at the first level. Neumann counters that this separation is artificial. To understand why the set contains the member, you must understand the nature of the set as a container. If you ignore the nature of the container, you cannot fully explain why the set exists as it does. The explanation fails to be ultimate because it ignores the very features that make the essence what it is.

Having shown that these three attempts to defend the ultimate nature of essence fall short, Neumann proposes a different path. He suggests we stop looking for a mysterious, separate entity called "essence" and instead look at the object's parts. He introduces a concept called "intrinsic necessity." In this view, an object is essentially what it is because of the parts that make it up. For instance, a single-item set exists and contains its member because the member is a part of the set. The necessity comes from the relationship between the whole and its parts, not from a magical essence hovering above them. If you take away the part, the whole ceases to exist. This approach allows us to explain why things are necessary without needing to stop at an unexplainable "essence." We can keep asking questions about the parts, and the parts of those parts, without hitting a dead end.

Neumann acknowledges that this view changes how we think about explanation. Instead of a final, unchangeable answer, we get a chain of relationships between parts. This might feel less final to some, but Neumann argues it is more honest. It admits that our understanding is built on the concrete things that make up the world, rather than on abstract, unexplainable rules. He suggests that by focusing on what is intrinsic to an object—what is made of its own parts—we can explain necessity without pretending to have reached the end of inquiry. The paper does not claim to have solved the mystery of existence, but it does suggest that the old way of thinking about "essence" as the final answer was a dead end. By shifting the focus to the parts that constitute an object, we open up a clearer, more detailed way to understand why things are the way they are.

Technical Summary: The Ultimacy of Essence

Problem Statement
The paper addresses the metaphysical problem of the "ultimacy of essence." In contemporary metaphysics, essentialist explanations (e.g., " $x$ is $F$ by virtue of the nature of $x$ ") are often posited as ultimate, meaning they admit no further explanation. The author identifies two distinct aspects of this ultimacy: finality (the absence of further substantial insights into why $x$ is $F$ ) and essentiality (the nature of the fact that makes the explanation ultimate). The central problem is that recent accounts attempting to justify this ultimacy fail to provide a non-circular or non-arbitrary grounding for why essentialist explanations are truly ultimate. Specifically, the author argues that these accounts either beg the question regarding the nature of the essence itself or fail to demonstrate how essence confers necessity without relying on further, unexplained modal facts.

Methodology
The paper employs a critical survey and analytical methodology. It proceeds by:

Deconstructing three recent accounts of essentialist explanation to test their claim to ultimacy:
- Spinelli (2018): The view of "immediate relevance," where essence is ultimate because it contains only properties immediately relevant to the object.
- Wallner and Vaidya (2020): The "modal nature of essence," where essence is ultimate because it is axiomatic that essences confer necessity (a non-transmissive explanation).
- Glazier (2017) and Ditter (2024): The "inessential explanation," which argues against iterated essentialist claims (e.g., that it is essential to $x$ that it is essential to $x$ that $A$ ) to preserve ultimacy.
Identifying Deficiencies: For each account, the author demonstrates how the explanation fails to be ultimate in the intended sense, often by showing that the account relies on hidden assumptions about the nature of properties, sets, or the essentialist operator itself.
Proposing an Alternative: The author constructs a modalist alternative based on intrinsicality, utilizing concepts from Denby (2014), Bovey (2021), and Fine (2010) regarding part-whole relations and intrinsic properties.

Key Contributions and Arguments

Critique of Immediate Relevance (Spinelli): The author argues that Spinelli's distinction between an object's essence and the essence of that essence (to avoid Lowe's regress) fails. If the nature of the essence (e.g., being a property) is not relevant to the object, then the explanation is incomplete. However, if the nature of the essence is relevant, then the explanation is not ultimate because it depends on further facts about the nature of properties (universals vs. tropes). Thus, the "immediate relevance" criterion does not successfully block further inquiry.
Critique of Modal Nature (Wallner & Vaidya): The author contends that treating the necessity-conferring capacity of essence as a primitive axiom (that it lies in the essence of essence to be necessary) is insufficient. The account fails to explain why essence confers necessity. By distinguishing between the fact that $x$ is necessarily $F$ and the fact that "it is essential to $x$ that $x$ is necessarily $F$ ," the author creates a gap. The higher-order fact does not directly explain the necessity of the first-order fact without assuming the very necessity it seeks to explain.
Critique of Iterated Claims (Glazier/Ditter): The author argues that attempts to deny iterated essentialist claims (to preserve ultimacy) or to modify the essentialist operator (as Ditter does) do not solve the problem. If necessity is entailed by the operator or a higher-order fact rather than the nature of the object itself, the explanation is not truly about what the object is, but about the logical structure of the explanation.
Proposal: Intrinsic Necessary Essence (INE): The author proposes a modalist account where $x$ $x$ is essentially $F$ $F$ if and only if being $F$ $F$ is intrinsically necessary to $x$ $x$ .
- Mechanism: This view replaces the "essence" as a separate explanatory entity with the parts of the object. An object is essentially $F$ because $F$ is a property constituted by the parts of $x$ (e.g., the singleton set $\{Socrates\}$ contains Socrates because Socrates is a part of the set).
- Intrinsicality: Drawing on Bovey's amendment of Denby's definition, a property is intrinsic if the facts constituting it involve only parts of the object.
- Parthood: The account utilizes a pluralistic view of parthood (Fine 2010), where parts can be mereological (fusions) or set-theoretic (members).
- Grounding: Unlike standard grounding theories that require well-founded chains ending in ungrounded facts, this account allows for a liberal, non-terminating chain of explanation based on parthood. The explanation is not "ultimate" in the sense of being ungrounded, but is explanatory in virtue of the constitutive parts of the object.

Results
The analysis concludes that the three surveyed essentialist accounts fail to secure the purported ultimacy of essence because they either rely on unexplained primitives or fail to connect the necessity of the explanandum directly to the nature of the object without intermediate, non-ultimate steps. The proposed modal account of intrinsicality successfully replicates the distinctions essentialists make (e.g., distinguishing between $\{Socrates\}$ containing Socrates and Socrates being contained by $\{Socrates\}$ ) without positing essence as a distinct, ungrounded entity. Instead, it grounds essentiality in the intrinsic parts of the object.

Significance
The paper claims that a modal account of essence via intrinsicality offers a viable alternative to essentialist explanations. Its significance lies in:

Dissolving the Ultimacy Requirement: It suggests that the demand for "ultimate" explanations in terms of ungrounded essences is open to question. Explanations can be robust and informative by appealing to the constitutive parts of an object without needing to be "final" in a metaphysical sense.
Avoiding Regress and Circularity: By shifting the locus of explanation from a mysterious "essence" to the "parts" of an object, the account avoids the regress of essences of essences and the circularity of defining necessity via essence.
Reframing Necessity: It reframes the necessity of essential properties not as a brute fact of nature, but as a consequence of the object's composition (what it is "made of").

The author remains modest regarding the proposal, acknowledging that it requires further work to handle relational intrinsic properties and to fully specify the constraints on the parthood relation, but maintains that it provides a more tractable framework for understanding essentialist claims than the current essentialist alternatives.

More like this