Pugliese, Roberto: A Thing Is a Thing: Difference, Relation, and the End of Essentialist Epistemology

Western epistemological tradition has generally conceived knowledge as progressive access to the intrinsic nature of entities. Even the most sophisticated scientific descriptions are often interpreted as attempts to grasp what things “are” in themselves, independently of the relations within which they appear. This paper proposes a critique of this essentialist framework by developing a relational and differential perspective in which identity, meaning, and knowledge emerge as dynamic configurat