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Quiddity. n.

Joe Grimwade




Quiddity: n.
1. The essence of a thing.
2.a. A quibble.
2.b. An eccentricity; a distinctive feature.

Two second-rate philosophers were standing at the bar of their favourite watering hole, The Stoic’s Bathtub, arguing (as philosophers are wont to do) over one of the eternal questions: whose turn it was to buy the round.


Naturally, their arguments turned on the essence of things.


“The quiddity of the situation strikes me thus,” the First held forth, “that you claim always to have paid on the prior occasion, so that I end up paying, and hence, by simple inductive logic, I always pay.” (I did specify that they were second-rate philosophers, did I not?)


“Nonsense,” the Second held out, “If on the prior occasion I paid, a priori I need not always pay. Further, wealth is but a construct, which we ought renounce. Where be your quiddities now?”


“Enough of the cynical Cynic shtick – you’re a freeloader, that’s the truth.”


Quid est veritas?” said the Second, who fancied himself a Latinist.


Quidquid,” said the First, sarcastically.


“That’ll be six quid, gents,” said the barman, “Pay up, or get out.”


As the erudite dialectic above suggests, the question of what makes something what it is – and the shared qualities of two things that are instances of the same something – is at the core of the philosophical concept of quiddity.

This is how Medieval scholars employed the post-classical Latin term quidditas, derived from quid (the neuter interrogative pronoun, often translated as ‘what?’): a conceptualisation, as it were, of ‘whatness’. By Shakespeare’s era, the English ‘quiddity’ denoted an academic quibble, the kind of nit-picking argument a lawyer would make, at least according to Hamlet, who, in the famous graveyard scene, beholds what he supposes to be a lawyer’s skull and asks, “Where be his quiddits now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?” (Hamlet, 5.1.94-5). Today, as well as being employed in philosophy and law, ‘quiddity’ is used in a more quotidian context to denote an eccentricity, personal oddity, or peculiar trait – the quiddity of our two philosophers, for example, might well be their quiddities. QED.[i]

[i] Quidditas erat demonstranda.

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