The history of ontology has consisted largely of a set of fundamental, often long-running and implacable disputes about what there is, accompanied by reflections about the discipline's own methods, status, and fundamental concepts e.g., being, existence, identity, essence, possibility, part, one, object, property, relation, fact, and world.
Several features define protai ousiai: they are subjects of predication that cannot themselves be predicated of things (they are not universals); things exist "in" them, but they do not exist "in" things (they are not accidents like Socrates' wisdom or his ironic smile); they have determinate identities (essences).
This is a crucial point for Simon's epistemology, for it is this real identity of essence and particular which allows us to gain scientific knowledge of particulars, since the essence can be equated with a thing's form, and the form comes to be in the soul and an object of its immediate awareness when the soul knows a thing.
Not only is each trope identical to the property it has, in each trope there is an identity of essence and existence.
"One day soon after I came on, David spoke about identity and essence, about the classical shape of the hero's journey in myth.
They could be used to make cheap radio-frequency identity tags in essence, printable bar-codes that transmit an identifying code in response to a pulsed radio signal.
The notion of essential dependence, which involves requirements for identity or essence, may better express what God's supposed ontological independence is about.
But it always floods us with questions regarding our identity and essence, our nationality and history.
This is borne out by the sudden rush for the College of Arms to create a Coat of Arms for the soon-to-be-princess: England's ruling classes were all over the importance of recognizable brand identity and essence way before any riffraff like me ever got involved.
The artist Kristin Lucas and Andrew Kortina, who builds social Web applications, proposed a way for people to exchange identities — in essence, to take a break from themselves — via Twitter.
Jewish identity is the essence of our national character.
