Introduction

The impact of the new essentialism in philosophy should be considerable, because a great deal of modern philosophy was conceived in response to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and therefore in reaction to Aristotelianism. But essentialism requires an understanding of the nature of reality that is more akin to the Aristotelian one than to the mechanist philosophy of Descartes or Newton. It also points to the need for a new programme of analysis, new conceptions of necessity and possibility, and new foundations for modal logics.

The consequences outside philosophy are likely to be less dramatic, because philosophy has ceased to be the dominant force that it once was, and the perspective of modern essentialism is less alien to modern science than it would have been to the sciences of the eighteenth century. The idea that things are intrinsically disposed to behave as they do is already widely accepted in fields such as physics and chemistry. In fact, it is chemistry that has provided much of the initial motivation for developing essentialist theory. Consequently, there are few, if any, implications for chemistry that are not already accepted by working chemists, and those for physics tend to be in areas such as cosmology, where physical theory engages with fundamental questions of ontology.