ESSENTIALISM

Essentialism

Essentialism

Introduction

Supervision is a channel of development. A competent instructional supervisor is a catalyst of learning and teaching. That supervisor guarantees that coaches, support staff and teachers, have all the information and tools which they require to continuously advance their skills. Essentialism stresses on premium curriculum for all teachers, students as well-informed authorities in the classroom, and a well-built teaching work based on high-class education of teachers. Different issues have, however, been central in debates about essences and essential predication in different periods in the history of philosophy. In our own day, it is commitment to the notion of de re modality that is generally taken to render a theory essentialist; but in the essentialist tradition stemming from Aristotle, discussions of essence and essential predication focus on the distinction between how an object is and what it is. This paper discusses my supervisory platform which is Essentialism.

Discussion

According to Aristotle, the universals that an ordinary object instantiates include some that mark it out as what it is and others that characterize it in some way but do not figure in an account of what it is. In the Categories, he tells us that while the former are said of the object, the latter are merely present in it; and in other writings, he distinguishes between what he calls kath hauto or per se predications (where these include the predication of what-universals) and kata sumbebekos or per accidens predications (where these include the predication of how-universals). He concedes that universals predicated of an object kath hauto are necessary to that object; but he construes the necessity here as derivative. It is because a universal marks out an entity, x, as what x is and hence underlies its being the thing that it is that the universal is necessarily predicated of x. (Sayer, 2007)

Aristotle holds that there is definition only of universals; and this commits him to the view that there are no individual essences. Although he concedes that we can provide definitions of universals from any of his list of tencategories, he gives pride of place to the essences of universals from the category of substance. Substance-universals can be identified without reference to essences from other categories, but the essences of qualities, quantities, and other non-substances can be defined only by reference to the essences of substances. In his early writings, Aristotle took the familiar particulars of common sense (things like the individual man and horse of Categories V) to be the primary substances;and in these writings it is the essences we isolate by defining the kinds or species under which familiar particulars fall that are construed as the basic or paradigmatic essences. However, in later writings, where ordinary particulars are taken to be complexes of matter and form, it is the substantial forms of familiar particulars that are the primary substances, so their essences are the primary or basic essences; and a central theme in Aristotle's most mature writings is the idea that the primary substances and their essences are necessarily ...