The authors are grateful for support from the Swiss FNS (research projects on "The Theory of Essence", "Properties and Relations").
Spinoza's various claims about essences, properties, and accidents suggest that at least some of the cases of destruction that we might consider self-destruction are, for Spinoza, destruction by external causes (Garrett, 2002, pursues this strategy).
Socrates looked for the essence, necessary property or ineliminable trait that made particular acts pious or just.
Each of these propositions has as part of its essence the property being true (at least from the point of view of most orthodox theists who have thought about these issues).
"The theory used to be that the state has an interest in the health and wellbeing of its citizens," acccording to Wynia, "and therefore you as a citizen do not have a right to kill yourself, because you are, in essence, a property of the state".
The statistical learning theory, in essence, characterizes properties of learning machines to make them able of generalization to unseen data.
In essence, toxicological properties of a chemical entity are discerned by connecting a query gene signature generated as a result of exposure of a biological system (whole animal, tissue or cell line) to the chemical, to other, already known, chemical entities via a database of chemical compound reference gene expression signatures (pioneered in [ 2]).
Do essences (or properties in general) exist in the physical world?
According to some philosophers, there are also individual essences, essential properties that characterize individuals univocally (Plantinga 1974).
As noted earlier, quidditism is the view that the essences of properties consist of something logically different from their theoretical roles in Shoemaker's terms, their causal potentialities.
