"Pluralist Essentialism: How Davidson, Aristotle and Kripke Are All Partly Right"

The Department of Philosophy welcomes Sam Wheeler presenting a Titus Hepp Lecture, “Pluralist Essentialism: How Davidson, Aristotle and Kripke Are All Partly Right.” Donald Davidson’s externalism and principle of charity imply that he should have been a kind of essentialist, agreeing with Aristotle, Kripke and others that there are de remodal truths about entities. Given that, as Davidson said, “sameness is always relative to a predicate,” entities should be regarded as articulations of what is, albeit articulations that are not given, but imposed in order to allow us to make inferences that depend on sub-sentential structure. Just as space does not come divided into feet as opposed to meters, so the world does not come divided into just one set of kinds of object. Dr. Sam Wheeler III is professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He writes in philosophy of language, metaphysics, ethics, deconstruction, and ancient philosophy. He published “Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics” in 2013 and is currently working on a book on modality.