Essentialism, Explanation and Metaphysical Themes about Language

This collection of essays harvests Ujvári’s previous studies in essentialist
metaphysics with particular emphasis on questions of explanation and language
imbued by metaphysics. Two chapters were newly written for this volume. The
conceptual connections of the papers as chapter-contents are highlighted in
the texts. For example, how the special feature of origin properties determine
the modal status of sortal specifications; why the central role of explanation
creates a need for positing individual essences on top of sortal ones; how the
essentialist account of Cambridge changes compete with their mereological
account; what the limits of mereology are in metaphysical applications; what
the relevance of the Kantian or the Aristotelian conceptual inventories are
for themes of current analytic metaphysics, such as the status of conceptual
schemes, the scheme-content connection and its holistic reading, the question
of the privileged namings of kind essences vs reference under different
semantic guises; the metaphysical consequences of vagueness with multi-
criteria predicates. Purporting to show the virtues of a modest form of
essentialism, mainly with Aristotelian background, a chapter is dedicated to
assessing the recent dispute between essentialism and the so-called modalist
position.