In contrast to Lowe's account, it is possible for Hale to offer an account of (B) through the use of conceptual analysis or through a treatment of the real definitions of essence and metaphysical modality.
Plantinga's definition of an essence is given in the section on Individual Essences in the entry actualism.
In order to design his machine (known to posterity as the "Turing machine"), he needed to find an unambiguous definition of the essence of a computer.
Vasubandhu defined inference as a knowledge of an object through its mark, but Dharmottara, an 8th-century commentator, pointed out that this is not a definition of the essence of inference but only of its origin.
There were countless variations of themes such as the preexistent Logos or the concept of adoption, but they provide some sense of the ways the early Apologists carried out their task of contributing to the definition of the essence of their Jesus-focused yet monotheistic faith.
Plato's metaphysical understanding of the forms already lays the ground for Kripke's influential definition of an essence as an invariant property that can be "rigidly designated" across all possible worlds.
While the concept and definition of 'real essence' is original with Locke, at least a generation before him there were Englishmen who defended non-Scholastic taxonomical theories that employed material structures, either atomic or corpuscularian structures, to play both roles (a) and (b), and therefore serve as the essences of physical substances.
So the first part of the definition of an individual essence — the "essence" part — is that an individual essence is an essential property of anything that has it.
Yet the metalinguistic quantifiers in the definitions of 'individual essence' and 'coexemplification' must, on pain of circularity, be taken to range over individuals.
This deviates from the standard definitions of an essence and is much closer to Plato's forms than the traditional notion of māhiyyah.
