Why Contextualist Approaches to Essences are worth Pursuing

In this paper, my goal is to delve into several reasons that support adopting modal contextualist frameworks for understanding essences, and to show why they deserve further consideration. Contextualist approaches, in my view, are often dismissed because too much emphasis is placed on their disadvantages. For this reason, I advocate for a discussion that encompasses not only the advantages but also the drawbacks, some of which I believe have been overestimated. Although my main focus will be on David Lewis’s proposal, many of the arguments I put forward can also be applied to other contextualist frameworks.