Essence, Triviality, and Fundamentality

Abstract I defend a new account of constitutive essence on which an entity’s constitutively essential properties are its most fundamental, nontrivial necessary properties. argue that this accommodates the Finean counterexamples to classic modalism about essence, provides independently plausible and does not run into clear counterexamples. conclude theory promising way forward for attempts produce adequate nonprimitivist, modalist essence. As both triviality fundamentality in understood terms grounding, also potentially has important implications relation between grounding.