Abstract
Not a whole lot is essential to me: my identity, my kind, my origins, consequences of these, and that is pretty much it. Of my intrinsic properties, it seems arguable that none are essential, or at least none specific enough to distinguish me from other humans. And, without getting into the question of whether existence is a property, it is certainly not part of my essence to exist.
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Notes
There is an analogy here with Hartry Field’s views on “the reason” for having a truth-predicate, in the absence of any corresponding property.
See the last few pages of Putnam [1967] and “Putnam Sematics” in Hellman [1989].
This might sound funny, given the widespread view that there are some things (the sets) that are too many to form a set. This widespread view is at odds with (S) only if it is supposed that there is some definite bunch of things including all and only the sets. If the sets are a definite bunch of things, it is very hard to understand what could be wrong with gathering them together into a further set. I agree with Putnam when he says that “no concrete model [of Zermelo set theory] could be maximal — nor any non-concrete model either, as far as that goes. Even God could not make a model for Zermelo set theory that it would be mathematically impossible to extend, and no matter what `stuff He might use. [...] it is not necessary to think of sets as one system of objects […] in order to follow assertions about all sets” (Putnam [ 1967 ], p. 21 ).
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Yablo, S. (2002). Abstract Objects: A Case Study. In: Bottani, A., Carrara, M., Giaretta, P. (eds) Individuals, Essence and Identity. Topoi Library, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1866-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1866-0_7
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