Essentialism and semantic theory of Aristotle in modern analytic philosophy

A certain tendency can be spotted in the English-speaking philosophical community - predominantly (but not exclusively) among ancient philosophy scholars - in the last few decades. It is a tendency to compare certain traits of Aristotle's philosophy with the semantic theories of certain modern analytics philosophers - mainly with those ones of Sual Kripke and Hillary Putnam. The subjects under comparison are "essentialism" and certain elements of "semantic theory" of Aristotle and the semantic theories of Putnam and Kripke. Comparing those scholars find surprisingly large number of similar traits - starting with the thesis, that essences of the certain objects, though being necessary, are discovered in course of scientific investigation and in certain cases all the way to the "linguistic division of labor". But how valuable such comparisons really are? To answer that we have to turn to the question of for what purposes comparison of two theories can be performed at all. We can compare two theories to track a historical influence of the earlier to the later - but that is obviously not the case with the theories under question, as they are not connected in any such way. We can further use the earlier theory that is more familiar and more clear to as a means of understanding a later and a less intelligible; but that in not the case as well in our case, as the theory in question of Aristotle, being fragmentary, not easy to follow and overall convoluted, is much less intelligible than those of Kripke and Putnam. Finally we can on contrary try to elucidate the earlier convoluted theory by the comparing it to the later and intelligible one; however if there is no real historical connection between them (and in our case there is not) we have no right to do that, as we would be forcing the problematic of the later theory on the earlier one with no ground for doing that whatsoever. Therefore I come to the conclusion that this kind of comparisons can not be counted among theoretically valuable ones: it can be curious and quite entertaining, but it can hardly help us to understand either of the theories in question.

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