1 Essentiality as foundationality Michael Gorman Introduction The question of essence has long been central to philosophical inquiry. Plato’ s dialogues, for example, often involve attempts to find the essence of something so as to be able to define it, and Aristotle’ s quest for ousia, in the science that came eventually to be called “metaphysics”, is intimately bound up with the quest for essence. Despite occasional outbursts of anti-metaphysical sentiment, analytic philosophers too have often engaged the question of essence. Some, like Quine, have done so in a negative vein, casting doubt on whether there is any mind- or language-independent difference between the essential and the accidental features of things. Others, like Plantinga and Kripke, have accepted the distinction and used it extensively. But with only a few exceptions, and those mostly quite recent, analytic discussions of the distinction between the essential and the accidental have taken for granted a certain view of what the distinction is in the first place. And interestingly, this received view is, in important respects, at odds with the tradition of essentialism that runs from Aristotle to his medieval and modern followers. In this paper, I propose a way of thinking about essence and accident that stands in the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. At the core of my proposal will be the claim that a thing’s accidental features are those of its features that are supported by other features it has, while its essential features are those that are foundational, viz., not supported by any other features it has. 1 1 I presented an earlier version of this theory in my “The Essential and the Accidental”, Ratio 18 (2005): 276-89, where I used “explanation” to name what I here call “support”. A similar