The Virtues of Superessentialism

Superessentialism is the view that every event that occurs in the life of a person, everything that happens to him or her and every decision and action that he or she performs, is essential to that person, is constitutive of that person’s identity. According to superessentialism, it is metaphysically impossible for a person’s life to have gone any differently than it in fact did. In this paper, I argue that, despite its initial implausibility, superessentialism opens up new solutions to three well-known problems in the philosophy of religion: the problem of freedom and creation, the grounding problem for Molinism, and the problem of eternal separation. As a result, while superessentialism might strike many of us as implausible, it possesses an impressive amount of utility. And, for that reason, I think that it might be worth a second look.