1 For a case of NSV see the version given by White in ‘origins of Aristotle's Essentialism,' Review of Metaphysics 26 (1972) 57-85.

2 At any rate Aristotle would, since he holds that any affirmative statement implies the existence of the subject. For more on this see my ‘Aristotle on the Existential Import of Singular Sentences,’ Phronesis 23 (1978).

3 So Plantinga who treats being-a-non-number, for example, as an essential property of Socrates (see The Nature of Necessity [Oxford 1974] 29-30, 60-2).

4 A further obstacle to Aristotle's recognition of negative essential properties is the fact that any object will have an infinite number of them. Socrates, for instance, will have being-non-identical-with-the-number-seven as an essential property. But this contradicts Aristotle's assertion in Posterior Analytics 1.22 that there cannot be an infinite number of elements in the essence of a thing. The same point may underlie Aristotle's Categories 5 (also Metaphysics K.12, 1068a10-11) claim that substances have no contraries, since this amounts to saying that essences [of objects] have no contraries. It may also be involved in his objection to division by simple dichotomy.

5 White, 59-61

6 For awhile there will be no need to mention SV* since what I say about SV will apply to SV* as well.

7 White, for instance, is inclined toward this interpretation. See footnote 11 for further remarks on White's view of this passage.

8 Alan Code ('Aristotle's Response to Quine's Objections to Modal Logic,’ Journal of Philosophical Logic 5 [1976]159-86) holds that there is a sense in which one could (and Aristotle would) still honor such identities, namely, by asserting that the 37th President of the United States is a spatio-temporal part of Nixon. Unfortunately, this requires the anachronism that ordinary objects such as Nixon be regarded as spatio-temporal worms. Code's attempt (182) to neutralize this objection does not strike me as successful. Even if the possibility of a worm theoretic account follows from Aristotle's view of objects as spatial items which persist through time and change, other accounts are also possible. Indeed, if ordinary objects just are spatio-temporal worms, then it cannot be the case that, strictly speaking, they remain the same in the required sense. So, for example, Smith who delivers a paper at t₁ could not, strictly speaking, be identical with the Smith who earlier wrote the paper. Indeed, it is even unclear that the papers are the same. Since the theory of substance holds that there is something (namely, the substance) which, in a strong sense, remains the same over change, it provides a theory of ordinary objects different from worm theory. Of course, substance theory is compatible with a weak worm theoretic account simply because, when a thing's substance endures through a given time frame, there will be a spatio-temporal worm associated with the thing for that time frame. What substance theory means to counter, I submit, is the stronger, and more interesting, claim that objects are to be regarded only as spatiotemporal worces objects appear rather like or processes. Unfortunately, Aristotle never associates substances and processes in the manner here required and so the worm theoretic interpretation is simply inappropriate.

9 On this, see White, 74-5.

10 This tells against Code's suggestion (179) that adjectival entities are individuals from non-substance categories.

11 White (73-4) turns the fact that ‘The white is a log’ can be true into an argument that even substance predicates will not satisfy NSV. But this depends on (i) reading ‘the white’ as ‘the white thing’ and taking the latter as carrying commitment to an adjectival entity and (ii) holding that the careers of such entities may exceed those of their companion substance particulars. He argues for (ii) by citing On Generation and Corruption 319b15-25. So far as I can tell, however, all that is here justified is the claim that when a quality remains the same across a substantial change (say both man and corpse being white), it is mistaken to construe the man and the corpse as properties of the persisting . While this damages persistence over change as a criterion of substantiality, it does not show that ‘things (e.g., some “white things”) which are men will continue to exist even after they have ceased to be men.’ This requires that (i) be shown, which it hasn't been. Notice also that this is a problem, if at all, for NSV but not for SV or SV*.

12 I discuss the topic of this paragraph at greater length in the article mentioned in footnote 2.

13 Ross translates:’ · “Socrates” or “Coriscus,” if even the soul of Socrates may be called Socrates, has two meanings (for some mean by such a term the soul, and others mean the concrete thing), but if “Socrates” or “Coriscus” means simply this particular soul and this particular body, the individual is analogous to the universal in its composition.'

14 This may overly simplify matters. Without argument one could not exclude, say, something of the following sort: . where G is Socrates Since such complications do not affect the main point of my argument, I leave them aside.

15 Using the notion of a world-indexed property, Plantinga, for instance, might urge that (5.2) is true-in-a, where a is that possible world which happens to be the actual world. But, whatever its independent merit, it is hardly plausible to attribute this maneuver to Aristotle.

16 Thus, individual essential properties do not help much in matters of descriptive identification because this would require inclusion of at least some accidental properties in an individual's essence. Nor, obviously, can any feature of Callias’ essence put him into a different natural kind of substance class from Socrates. The following point is also relevant. The senses of ‘χαθ αύτό’ listed in Δ. 18 parallel already given sense of ‘χαθ´ ő.’ First mentioned of the latter is the form or substance of each thing [1022a14·15l. So if Aristotle can be made to hold that there are forms of individuals. it would not be surprising to find him recognizing individual essences. And. in fact, recent work has put the former notion to favorable use, particularly in interpreting the central books of the Metaphysics.

17 White, 62

18 White, 66

19 I would like to thank Ian Mueller and an unnamed referee for judicious criticism of earlier versions of this paper.