Artifacts

This chapter continues the examination of the special features of artifacts by discussing their place within existing essentialist and anti-essentialist frameworks. It will be argued that prominent essentialist treatments of artifacts, such as those proposed by Amie Thomasson, Simon Evnine, and Lynne Rudder Baker, are susceptible to the concern that they exaggerate the creative and discriminating power of human intentions. Existing anti-essentialist frameworks, however, tend to trace the ascriptions of modal features to objects back to our semantic, inferential, or explanatory practices and are therefore also not particularly well suited to capture the primarily practical and action-based orientation of our engagement with the realm of artifacts. For the time being, the special case of artifacts eludes an entirely satisfactory treatment and must await the further development and refinement of suitable essentialist and anti-essentialist frameworks before the status of artifacts within a hylomorphic ontology can be fully resolved.