Abstract
Following Kit Fine, a number of authors today defend a premodal conception of essence: according to them, the modal concept of necessity is too thick to define the notion of essence, and we must instead start from the notion of essence to define or at least found metaphysical necessity and possibility. This program is based on the principle of essential foundation, which states that every necessary truth is an essential truth, i.e. a statement that is true by virtue of the essence of something. My aim here is to show that certain cases of numerical distinction between concrete objects constitute potential counterexamples to the foundation principle, in other words, cases of necessary but non-essential truths.
