Andrew Butler

Property realism is the view that there are mind-independent universals. In this paper, I present a distinctive argument for property realism, partly inspired by Edmund Husserl, which has not appeared in the contemporary literature and has only a spare few precedents in the history of philosophy. The argument is distinguished by being phenomenological, that is, based in reflective analysis of experiential content. It shows that universals must exist because we can have veridical experiences as of universals whose contents cannot be reduced to representations of particulars.

This paper argues that the following three popular doctrines are in tension with one another: (i) property essentialism, the view that at least some properties have essences; (ii) the canonical reduction of modality to essence, due to Fine; and (iii) Aristotelianism, the view that properties cannot exist uninstantiated. I consider the different ways in which the Aristotelian might respond to the tension I raise, and I show that each of them has a metaphysically interesting upshot. I also suggest that none of the Aristotelian’s possible responses is prima facie preferable to Platonism, the view that properties can exist uninstantiated, and that Aristotelianism is less plausible overall than ETM or property essentialism. I tentatively conclude, then, that my arguments make a case that the property essentialist—and, more tentatively, the property realist—should embrace Platonism over Aristotelianism. My primary aim in doing so, however, is not to definitively argue for Platonism, but more modestly to raise a challenge to the Aristotelian that has not yet appeared in the literature on properties.

The two dominant theories of perception nowadays are representationalism and relationism. Representationalists hold that perceptual experience is a representation of the world as being one way rather than another, whether it really is that way or exists at all. Relationists hold that perceptual experience is a non-representational relation to actually existing objects and property-instances. Relationists notoriously have a hard time explaining many perceptual phenomena for which the representationalist has simple and intuitive accounts. Despite this, relationists alone seem able to account straightforwardly for the ability of perceptual experience to provide de re knowledge of particulars. To this extent, a theory of perception that is able to unify representationalism and relationism would have tremendous explanatory payoff. I argue that Edmund Husserl had such a unifying theory, according to which perceptual experience is fundamentally both representational and relational. I show that on Husserl’s ontology of perception, the explanatory resources of representationalism and relationism do not compete. I show, too, that the account I attribute to Husserl has notable advantages over a well-known attempt to unify representationalism and relationism, due to Susanna Schellenberg.

Although Husserl’s theory of essence has recently emerged as historically impor- tant, it has not been deemed useful to contemporary essentialism. Many essential- ists nowadays propose to reduce metaphysical modality to the essences of things. They are accordingly tasked with explaining why essence generates modality in the required way. It is widely believed, however, that Husserl has a modal account of essence and is thus unable to contribute to such a project. Against this consen- sus, I show that Husserl’s theory of essence contains resources for safeguarding a promising recent proposal to meet this explanatory challenge, viz., the proposal to model essence in terms of generalized identity and to establish its necessity by ap- peal to the necessity of identity. Recently, Jessica Leech (2021) has challenged this proposal on grounds that, because identity inherits its necessity from the logical necessity of self-identity, it collapses the necessity of essence into logical neces- sity. To this extent, it appears to make the latter do all the work in accounting for metaphysical necessity, obviating the need for an essentialist account of modality in the first place. I argue that Husserl has something approaching an account of essence as generalized identity and that his account contains resources for defusing Leech’s challenge. If I am right, then Husserl’s essentialism, when combined with certain Husserl-independent theoretical commitments, offers a live and potentially fruitful resource for the contemporary project of reducing metaphysical modality to essence.

Husserl's proposed method for knowing the essences of universals, which he calls “free variation,” has been widely criticized for involving viciously circular reasoning. In this paper, I review existing attempts to resolve this problem, and I argue that they all fail. I then show that extant accounts are all guilty of a common mistake: they assume that circularity is inevitable as long as the exercise of free variation presupposes the ability to identify the universal whose essence is in question, that is, the ability to recognize entities as instances of it. I reject this assumption: I argue on both Husserlian and independent philosophical grounds that knowledge of a universal's essence is not required for identifying it, but only for re‐identifying it at every possible world in which it is instantiated. I then defend a reading on which free variation's purpose is to move its practitioner from non‐essentialistic knowledge of a universal's identity (its actual instantiation‐pattern) to essentialistic knowledge of its transworld identity (its instantiation‐pattern in every possible world in which it is present). And I show that such a transformation is a non‐circular progression from non‐modal to modal knowledge.