Please join us Wednesday, September 2, for another History of Philosophy Works-in-Progress Luncheon! Peter Harrigan (PhD candidate in philosophy) will speak to us on the topic: "Essentialism and the Grounds of Avicenna's Modal Ontology."
Each meeting consists of a presentation by a graduate student, faculty member, or visitor on a project that they are working on in the history of philosophy, followed by a period of comments/questions from other participants. The workshop is designed to give contributors the opportunity to develop ideas and receive helpful feedback on projects/papers in a friendly and low stakes environment.
Lunch is provided for registered attendees (to ensure we order enough lunches, please register by noon on the Monday of the presentation).
Abstract: In contemporary philosophy, "Essentialism" is a neo-Aristotelian theory of modality according to which facts about ontological modality are grounded in facts about the essences of things. One of the chief challenges for developing an "Essentialist" view is answering the so-called "meta-grounding question": what is it about essence, in virtue of which it grounds facts about ontological modality? In this paper, I argue (i) that Avicenna is an Essentialist vis-a-vis ontological modality, and yet (ii) the "meta-grounding" question has not been satisfactorily answered in reconstructions of his thought. The key to providing such an answer, I argue, is attending more closely to the connection between logical necessity and ontological necessity in Avicenna's thought. Avicenna indicates that everything that is ontologically necessary or possible, is logically necessary with respect to existence and logically possible with respect to existence, respectively. Further, in his logical works, Avicenna provides an account of how quiddities or essences, in virtue of their "definitional constituents" and "non-constitutive concomitants," ground de re logical facts about the objects with those quiddities. Bringing these aspects of Avicenna's thought together, I provide the following answer to the meta-grounding question: essences, in virtue of their “constituents” and “non-constitutive concomitants,” ground de re modal facts about which objects are logically possible and necessary in existence. These logical facts then ground the corresponding ontological-modal facts. On this construal, that which is ontologically necessary is that whose existence is logically necessitated by some essence, and that which is ontologically possible is that whose essence is logically consistent with existence. Finally, I conclude by noting several ramifications of my interpretation for broader debates about Avicennian metaphysics.