essence might support the epistemological view and vice versa. Recall that Descartes
claims to discover the essence of extended substance prior to determining whether
there actually are extended substances, and he makes this claim partly because of his
view about strict essence.^29
Spinoza seems to reject the Cartesian view, since he appears to accept that there are
things that cannot exist and yet have essences.^30 So the Cartesian view was not
uniformly accepted among the early moderns. Among later thinkers, Meinong is also
a candidate for rejecting the Cartesian view. His impossible objects haveSoseinsthat
distinguish them from each other, though none of them can exist. TheirSoseinsare
plausibly properly thought of as their real definitions, i.e., their essences.^31
Second,the possibilist view. The possibilist view endorses the Cartesian view along
with the additional claim that those things that possibly exist have a distinctive mode
of being,possible existence, that differs from actual existence. Whether Descartes
endorsed the possibilist view in addition to the Cartesian view is less clear.^32 In
general, the question of whether there can be truths of essence about what are in
some sense possible beings without there also being, in some way, possible beings, is
historically vexed. A clearer case seems to be Giles of Rome (1953: 61–7), who thinks
that possible beings are beings with essences that can exist; it is their essences that
make them possible beings, and acts of existence that make some of them actual.^33
general, I am very suspicious of any claim to know the strict essences of fundamental physical entities.)
Lowe (2008: 40) says that essence precedes existence, because (i) the essence of a thing can’t preclude its
existence, (ii) we can’t know something exists without knowing what it is, and (iii) we can know the essence
of a thing prior to knowing that it exists. Note that Aristotle (1984a: 153) seems to reject this epistemo-
logical principle in thePosterior AnalyticsII.8, 93a16–24.
(^29) The priority of our knowledge of essence over existence in Descartes is the central theme of the
excellent book by Secada (2000). (Note that Secada (2000: 8–9) characterizes both the theses that he calls
“essentialism”and“existentialism”as theses about the priority of either knowledge of essence or knowledge
of existence over the other; here, I use these expressions as theses primarily in metaphysics.) 30
See Spinoza (2002: 183), in which Spinoza tells us that the reason that a chimera cannot exist is that
its essence is contradictory. Similar remarks are made at 2002: 15 and 2002: 178. Note though that at p. 178,
Spinoza denies that chimeras are beings, so it is not fully clear what Spinoza’s position is. See Curley (1978:
14931 – 54) for discussion of why Descartes rejected attributing essences to impossible objects.
Findlay (1933: 49) explicitly says that, for Meinong,“what an object is”and its“real essence”consist
in its determinations ofSosein. Note that both Fine (1994a) and Dasgupta (2016) seriously consider
whether impossible entities such as round squares have essences. Charles (2000: 50) briefly discusses
whether Aristotle thought that non-entities can have strict essences. 32
See Brown (2011) and Cunning (2014) for a discussion of Descartes and the reality of the possibles.
Nolan (2015) suggests that, although Descartes does distinguish betweennecessary existenceandpossible
existence, what he means by the latter isdependentorcontingentexistence, rather than a kind of existence
that contrasts with 33 actualexistence.
Trentman (2000: 826–7) claims that, for Suárez,fictional characters do not have real being of any
sort, but there is a genuine kind of being that merely possible things have: possible things have
objective possible being. Wippel (2000: 403) notes that, for Henry of Ghent, there can be meaningful
knowledge of merely possible beings but not of imaginary entities, and hence possible entities enjoy a
mode of being had by neither actual entities norfictional entities. This mode of being might be
existence in the mind of God.