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In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and that it has necessity (in contrast with accidental properties that the object or substance has contingently, and without which the substance could have existed). The notion of essence has acquired many slightly but importantly different shades of meaning throughout the history of philosophy; most of them derive from its use by Aristotle and its evolution within the scholastic tradition. Based on such considerations, essence became a key notion of alchemy (cf. quintessence). In the history of western thought, essence has often served as a vehicle for doctrines that tend to individuate different forms of existence as well as different identity conditions for objects and properties; in this eminently logical meaning, the concept has given a strong theoretical and common-sense basis to the whole family of logical theories based on the "possible worlds" analogy set up by Leibniz and developed in the intensional logic from Carnap to Kripke, which was later challenged by "extensionalist" philosophers such as Quine. The English word "essence" comes from the Latin essentia, which was coined (from the Latin esse, "to be") by ancient Roman scholars in order to translate the Ancient Greek phrase to ti en einai (literally, "what it is for a thing to be"), coined by Aristotle to denote a thing's essence.[1]
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