Abstract. The neo-Aristotelian conception of essence has gained prominence in recent analytic metaphysics. I will present an epistemic problem for such essentialists. The challenge centers on the following question: assuming there are essence-facts, what relationship between essence-facts and essence-attitudes explains why those attitudes’ correctness is not coincidental? It is a debunking challenge—what I call the explanatory challenge. The explanatory challenge is distinctive for at least three reasons: (i) it does not centrally concern the domain in question containing abstract objects, or having evolutionary etiologies, (ii) it targets neo-Aristotelian essentialism, not merely essentialism insofar as it is modally analyzable, and (iii) the challenge comes in three grades—weak, moderate, and strong. Although debunking challenges do not pose a problem unique to essentialism, they have yet to be explicitly applied to essentialism in detail. I aim to redress this omission here. I begin by explaining the challenge’s grades, paying particular attention to a species of the moderate grade, which generates a more specific challenge I call the deflationary challenge. Then, I’ll survey David Oderberg’s and E.J. Lowe’s epistemologies of essence. I’ll argue that their accounts fail the weak challenge and that this leaves them especially vulnerable to the moderate challenge, where this involves positive reason to think essence-facts do not, in fact, play an explanatory role in forming one's essence-attitudes. Lastly, I’ll propose that Amie Thomasson’s deflationary account of identity-conditions might offer a deflationary challenge for essentialism. 

Abstract. I give an account for how the (partial) essence of thought can be non-coincidentally grasped under the assumption that we stand in an acquaintance relation to our token thoughts. In other words, regarding the essence of thought, I attempt to give a positive answer to the explanatory challenge spelled out in O'Dwyer 2025. Given that essences are supposed to be something's underlying metaphysical principle of unity, we can grasp thought’s (partial) essence insofar as we can immediately grasp the unity involved in our higher-order token thoughts. This unity, I argue, involves the representational character of our token mental states. And so we can non-accidentally grasp that part of what it is to be a thought is to represent things as being a certain way (meeting the weak explanatory challenge, see O'Dwyer 2025). Lastly, I suggest that this may serve as a defeater-defeater for the sort of deflationary challenge I've previously suggested may face the essentialist. This doesn’t answer the explanatory challenge for all essentialist claims, but it may provide a proof of concept, as it were, for essentialism’s ability to handle the explanatory challenge.

Abstract. Recently, John Bengson (2015) has given an account for how the realist-rationalist—one who countenances abstracta and that knowledge thereof is (or can be) a priori—can come to have reliable access to the abstract objects their rational intuitions are about. Bengson argues that the relation such intuitions bear to abstracta is analogous to the relation posited in naïve realist views of perception: our intuitions are constitutively explained by abstracta. I argue that this explanation falters in two ways, both motivated by the modal status of (most) abstracta: (i) constitutive explanation is too coarse-grained, as there are cases which seem to satisfy the principle on which it operates yet are uninformative in terms of explanation, and (ii) that some abstract fact (partly) constitutes some mental state fails to individuate successful and unsuccessful intuitions without resorting to epistemic or psychological resources, and these are the very resources that Bengson says we need to avoid in order to adequately answer the problem concerning reliability of these intuitions, because it will only push the question to that epistemic state of affairs (e.g., if we know some abstract fact p in virtue of understanding that p, how does that understanding answer the problem of reliable access?)

Abstract. I provide an argument against George Tsai's account of paternalistic rational persuasion. While some have disagreed with how Tsai’s central case of rational persuasion is paternalistic (e.g., Davis 2016), the nature of persuasion’s being objectionably paternalistic as involving distrust is more or less taken for granted. I argue that the first two of these conditions, from considerations about distrust, are too broad such that they describe much of our non-paternalistic rational discourse—without some form of distrust present, it isn’t clear why we would be motivated to rationally persuade in the first place—and so these conditions seem implausible and normatively uninformative for Tsai’s purposes.