Essence Without Fundamentality

In Modality and Explanatory Reasoning, Boris Kment argues that a single notion of essence can be used to play two different theoretical roles. He thinks there is an important connection between essence and metaphysical necessity, on the one hand, and between essence and metaphysical explanation, on the other. It seems to me that there is a price to be paid for using a single notion of essence to play both of these roles. For the project of giving metaphysical explanations requires a notion of essence that distinguishes between truths that are more or less “fundamental”, in a metaphysical sense. So the result of using that same notion of essence in an account of metaphysical necessity is that one ends up with a conception of metaphysical necessity that is tied up with distinctions of metaphysical fundamentality. The main objective of this paper is to develop a notion of essence which steers clear of the notion of metaphysical fundamentality, and to suggest that it is well-suited to elucidate the notion of metaphysical necessity. I will also argue that the relevant notion of essence can be used to resolve a tension implicit in a famous argument of Kit Fine’s for the conclusion that the notion of essence cannot be adequately captured by the notion of metaphysical necessity. ∗An early version of this paper was presented as part of a symposium on Boris Kment’s Modality and Explanatory Reasoning at Princeton University. I am grateful to Boris for his excellent comments, and to the symposium’s organizers for putting together such a terrific event. For their many helpful suggestions, I would also like to thank Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt, Jon Litland, Daniel Muñoz, Gideon Rosen, Josh Schechter, an anonymous referee for Theoria, and seminar participants at Brown University. Special thanks are due to Gabriel Uzquiano, for his helpful comments and for asking me to take part in this volume.