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Fabrice Correia, Alexander Skiles, Essence, Modality, and Identity, Mind, Volume 131, Issue 524, October 2022, Pages 1279–1302, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzab017
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Extract
1. Introduction
In an article forthcoming in MIND, Jessica Leech (2020) raises a challenge for essentialists about metaphysical modality, who claim that facts about the essences of things account for all facts about what holds with metaphysical necessity. Suppose that Plato is necessarily human. Then according to the standard version of the view (cf. Fine 1994, 1995; Hale 2002, 2013), there is some fact about the essences of things—perhaps it is the fact that being human is part of what it is to be Plato—which accounts for the fact that he must be human. But if so, Leech writes, it may be reasonably asked why one should agree that whatever is essential is also necessary: ‘Why, just because […] Plato is essentially human, should it therefore be the case that Plato is necessarily human?’ (p. 3, emphasis in original) The answer cannot be that part of what accounts for Plato’s being essentially human is that he is necessarily human, which would be patently circular. But how else could the essentialist answer?
