Reply to Timothy Williamson

Timothy Williamson’s is a fascinating and challenging paper and I am afraid that in my short response I cannot do full justice to much of what he says. What I would like to do is to deal with four central issues raised by his paper. The first concerns the question of how to characterize the two theses that he finds in ‘Essence and Modality’ (henceforth referred to as E&M); the second is whether or how the use of functional expressions might lead us into mistakenly accepting certain essentialist judgements; the third is whether the error he finds in these cases might extend to the kinds of case considered in E&M; and the fourth is whether, on the basis of essentialist considerations, philosophers have reacted with undue haste in rejecting the intensional paradigm.