Essentialism in Late Plato and Aristotle’s Categories

Abstract

The central contention of this dissertation is that Plato, in Sophist and Statesman, and Aristotle, in Categories, have fundamentally different ways of drawing the distinction between a thing’s essential features and its non-essential features. Plato distinguishes the essential features of a thing from its non-essential features by reference to the different roles they play in metaphysical explanations, whereas Aristotle draws the distinction by contrasting two irreducibly different relations between objects and their features.