Aquinas and Kripke on the Genealogy of Essential Properties

The aim of this article is to reassess the similarity between Kripke’s metaphysics and Aquinas’ thought on truth, a similarity affirmed in Schultz-Aldrich’s Heythrop Journal article from 2009 and denied by Klima and Kerr in their analysis of Kripkean and Thomist accounts of essence. My claim is that this similarity has been insufficiently understood and its misunderstanding has closed off ways by means of which Aquinas’ thought can provide Kripkean epistemology with a component that it lacks.