Abstract
In contemporary debates on the knowledge of essences, it is often assumed that one and the same epistemology applies to all essences. Yet it is intuitively unlikely that the essences of things as different as people, numbers or gold can be known in the same way. While it is sometimes argued that the concrete/abstract distinction metaphysically founds a partition of the epistemology of essences, I maintain that it is another distinction that founds it, in virtue of which knowledge of essences belongs either to philosophy or to the empirical work of science.
