[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[Neo-Scholastic]

OK, so let's say that these properties, characteristics, attributes etc. = essence.  Essence, therefore is the sum of the descriptors... information.

There's the thing (existing) and there's the information about the thing (essence).

OK, I'll have to ponder this some more. 

At the moment, I think you're talking about a description of the essence, but not the essence itself.

For example, it is a part of Socrates' essence that he can learn languages. (This is sort of a classic example.) So this ability is a part of his essence. But an ability is not information. It can not be transferred down a wire or communicated through smoke signals. Socrates' essence includes rationality. But rationality is not information, I think. 

I can describe a very large set of things which are essential to Socrates, but this description is not the essence itself. 

But I welcome additional input on the problem.

Yeah, it could be that the ancients did present various essences in a kind of dictionary definition format..."rational animal" comes to mind. And that kind of approach, if taken too extremes, leads to silly examples. In contrast to this, I think a more contemporary scholastic approach is to treat an individual essence as that which determines the range of possible actualizations of a thing. And here, I am not thinking just about the ontological status of sets of properties or material dispositions within a Newtonian framework. Since that reality is fundamentally quantum mechanical, and as such one that is largely statistical, that suggests that the scholastic concepts of "being-in-act" and "being-in-potency" may not be an entirely binary and mutually exclusive distinction. For example, at my age I could get a medical degree, sure, but it is highly, highly unlikely. IDW could you call that 0.001% being-in-potency now versus 1% being-in-potency when I was 17?