it a potential grounder of a strict essence. For example, if God really can change the
mode of an attribute from a polyadic mode to a monadic mode, then it doesn’t seem
to be part of the strict essence of that attribute that it has either mode of being.^100 But
maybe this is OK, since many medieval thinkers think that, with the exception of
God, it is never part of the strict essence of a thing that it enjoys any mode of being.
Third, one could deny that strict essences are modally essential to the things that
have them. This is probably the most radical of the proposals, but is more defensible
than one might think.
A property is modally essential to a thing just in case that thing has that property
in every world in which it exists. This is an interesting notion of a kind of essence but
it isn’t the only one. Let’s spot for a moment that metaphysical necessity is perfectly
natural. Still, the generic mode of being that everything enjoys is not. Enjoying a
fundamental mode of being is prior to enjoying the generic kind of being. So if we
wish to speak“more deeply”in the metaphysically perfect language, we will formu-
late different and more selective notions of modal essence. Suppose there are two
fundamental modes of beingbandcwhich are represented by two quantifiers,“B”
and“C.”Corresponding to these two quantifiers are two metaphysically better
notions of modal essence:
xis b-essentiallyF= df.□[By(x=y)!Fx]
xis c-essentiallyF= df.□[Cy(x=y)!Fx]These notions of modal essence are defined solely in terms of perfectly natural
notions (again on the assumption that“□”is perfectly natural). And it might be
that an object that actually enjoys b-existence has its strict essence b-essentially, even
though it could have c-existed, and would not have had its actual strict essence
c-essentially had it c-existed, but would rather have had some different strict essence
altogether. In general, I feel the need to ensure that the strict essence of a thing is also
had in some modally robust way, but this way of proceeding seems to meet this need
adequately enough.
This third proposal might not give every fan of strict essence everything they want.
It is not obvious how to carry out the reduction of modality to essence proposed
both by Fine (1994a) and Lowe (2013: 202–3) on this third proposal.^101 (I assumed
momentarily for the sake of illustration the fundamentality of modality just now. But
this feels to me to be inessential to the spirit of the third proposal.) But if we are
existentialists in the sense of section 9.3, we will hold that many truths of strict
essence are contingent on the existence of objects, and hence will be suspicious of a
purported reduction of modality to strict essence. (A related question: if existential-
ism (discussed in section 9.3) is true, can modality reduce to strict essence?)
(^100) Donati (2014: 155–6) notes that Aquinas denies that the mode of being of afinite thing is included in
its essence. 101
Thanks to Joshua Schechter for discussion of this point.