(October 20, 2021 at 8:46 am)DLJ Wrote: Are there any of this "very large set of things which are essential to Socrates" that are unique to Socrates?
Other people can be language-learners and rational, other platypodes/platypuses have beaks and tails, so do birds.
Interesting question...
I'm guessing that most of what is unique to a given person (including Socrates) will be accident rather than essence. So his location at a given moment, or his list of lovers, or his eccentric tattoo, would be unique but not part of his essence.
What's unique about his essence would be the exact combination of non-unique features. But I think that human beings all share a kind of essence, which is what makes us things of the same type. And maybe, come to think of it, mammals also share mammal-essence, etc.
I recently had a run-in with someone else about the communicability of essence, by the way. There's a Japanese professor of the philosophy of art who claims that the purpose of art is to depict the essence of the thing depicted. So Van Gogh's sunflowers are great (he says) because they communicate the essence of sunflower-ness.
I argued against him, saying that it may appear this way, just because Van Gogh's depiction is so powerful and persuasive that we believe it is a true and essential depiction. But that in fact, what he's showing us is not the essence of the thing seen but a record of his own impression. We are seeing a sort of dialectic of the material paint and Van Gogh's inner phenomenal reception of the sunflowers. So I argued that if Gauguin were standing next to him painting the same flowers, the paintings would both be wonderful but would also look quite different, and that this means one of them would have to be incorrect about what the essence is. I don't think the essence of anything can be boiled down in this way, to something showable or transmittable.
