ABSTRACT
The publication of Kit Fine's “Essence and Modality” (1994) has had a deep impact on the way philosophers think about the connections between essence and modality. In this chapter, I mainly (i) present and discuss the non-modal views about essence that have been developed since the publication of Fine's paper—including Fine's own view—and (ii) present and discuss a variety of ways of developing the idea, advocated by Fine in the same paper, that metaphysical necessity has its “source” in essence.
