Why are many of us concerned with identifying essences? What should such a concept be a reality to be.........

Question

discovered?

Why should there be an essence to anything?

Why should such a concept exist?

sorry English is not my 1st language.

Answer 1

actually not many people are concerned with essences, only certain philosophers

Answer 2

Very good question.

Plato said essences were in the heavens. Those were his Forms, his Ideas, and on earth we saw the mirror images of them.

Aristotle said they were "in the things themselves" as if science could someday extract them.

The Stoics, Wm. of Occam, Ayn Rand, perhaps ibn Rushd, and others, said essences were concepts. I see you agree.

Kant said they were in the things themselves, using Aristotle's metaphysics; but then he said they were noumena and absolutely unknowable, so he used Plato's epistemology.

Rand used the term "Common Conceptual Denominator" instead of "essence," and gave it a strict definition:

"A commensurable characteristic (such as shape in the case of tables, or hue in the case of colors) is an essential element in the process of concept-formation. I shall designate it as the “Conceptual Common Denominator” and define it as “The characteristic(s) reducible to a unit of measurement, by means of which man differentiates two or more existents from other existents possessing it.”

"The distinguishing characteristic(s) of a concept represents a specified category of measurements within the “Conceptual Common Denominator” involved." Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 18.

The reason that essences are important is because they become the definitions we use to designate the identity of an object.

"The rules of correct definition are derived from the process of concept-formation. The units of a concept were differentiated—by means of a distinguishing characteristic(s)—from other existents possessing a commensurable characteristic, a Conceptual Common Denominator. A definition follows the same principle: it specifies the distinguishing characteristic(s) of the units, and indicates the category of existents from which they were differentiated.

"The distinguishing characteristic(s) of the units becomes the differentia of the concept’s definition; the existents possessing a Conceptual Common Denominator become the genus."

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 53.