‘Essence’ and ‘Nature’ in <i>Naming and Necessity</i>

ABSTRACT The aim of Kit Fine's 1994 paper ‘Essence and Modality’ was ‘to show that the contemporary assimilation of essence to modality is fundamentally misguided and that, as a consequence, the corresponding conception of metaphysics should be given up’ (p. 3). To be sure, assimilating what I will call whatness essence to what I will call modal essence would be a mistake. But who were the then‐contemporary philosophers Fine convicted of this assimilation? He names none. Given Saul Kripke's status as the leading modal metaphysician of the time, readers naturally assumed Fine was targeting Kripke, as well as others working in a similar vein. However, as I argued at a workshop attended by Fine, there is no legitimate reason to convict Kripke of the misguided assimilation. For reasons that are detailed in the present paper, I take Fine's recent ‘Some Remarks on the Role of Essence in Kripke's Naming and Necessity ’ to be his considered response to me as well as a reinforcement of his earlier attack on Kripke. In this paper, I defend Kripke.