Resumen de Modality, Sparsity, and Essence

Nathan Wildman

• Rather infamously, Kit Fine provided a series of counter-examples which purport to show that attempts to understand essence in terms of metaphysical necessity are �fundamentally misguided�. Here, my aim is to put forward a new version of modalism that is, I argue, immune to Fine's counter-examples. The core of this new modalist account is a sparseness restriction, such that an object's essential properties are those sparse properties it has in every world in which it exists. After first motivating this sparseness restriction, I proceed to show how the resulting sparse modalism circumvents Fine's original counter-examples. After dismissing a potential problem concerning the membership relation, I conclude that, as at least one form of modalism is viable, the project of understanding essence in terms of metaphysical necessity is not so fundamentally misguided after all.