Who is “Inverted Essentialist”?——An Exploration on Terry Eagleton's Essentialism of New Century

Terry Eagleton was more like an anti-essentialist 30 years ago for nominalism, and now he is an essentialist in realism sense, but he didn't convert from one ism to another. We should reinspect some misreadings from Aristotle's perspectives of the theory of four predictions and his ten categories. For Aristotle and Aquinas, the essence of matters lies in matters themselves, but not the prerequisite for matters; the existence of matters is the premise for the essence. Definition and essence are used for the cognition of the world. But the post-modernists affirm that definition decides the world, therefore this “inversion” reflects some logical errors in our recognition.