THE LIMITS OF NEO-ARISTOTELIAN PLENITUDE (AND ITS CONCEPTUAL NEIGHBORS)

Neo-Aristotelian Plenitude is the thesis that, necessarily, any property that could be had essentially by something or other is had essentially by something or other if and only if and because it is instantiated; any essentializable property is essentialized iff and because it is instantiated. In this paper, I develop a partial nonmodal characterization of ‘essentializable' and show it cannot be transformed into a full characterization. There are several seemingly insurmountable obstacles that any full characterization of essentializability must overcome. Moreover, these obstacles threaten other views in the conceptual neighborhood such as Counterpart Theoretic Plenitude and Conceptualist Plenitude.