Video from The Thomistic Institute
Essence and Existence (Aquinas 101)
“All chairs are quite different.” - HG Wells “If they were so different you could not call them all chairs.” - GK Chesterton The Pre-Socratics tried to explain everything as elemental fire or water or spirit. Many contemporary scientists try to explain everything as ordered bundles of chemicals, molecules, and atoms. The problem here is that these building blocks themselves are diverse. How do we account for that? The attempt to reduce everything to material bits is ill-fated. Reality is not simply built up from the bottom; it is also influenced from the top down. While the essence of a thing tells you what it is, the existence of a thing tells you that it is. Essence and Existence (Aquinas 101) - Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P." from video introduction.