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hey all, i noticed that the lead of this article might be a bit confusing - the rest of the article mostly seems fine but starting off the lead with language like "polysemic term" and explaining the concept of essence in terms of other, more technical terms is not going to be helpful for someone who hasn't heard the term "essence" in a philosophical context before. Perhaps rewriting the lead as less technical summary of the rest of the body might help? I know metaphysics can certainly be a complicated and difficult subject to explain, but I do think there's a lot of room for improvement. - car chasm (talk) 14:33, 22 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. The lead most of all, but some of the rest of the article as well. I'm not interested in taking this article on as a project, but I'm going to do what I can to at least tidy up what is there.
I've removed entire paragraph/sentence below that is unsupported by the body of the article and will not make sense to readers not already reasonably well-acquainted with 20th-century analytic philosophy. Anyone interested in supplying references and explanation should by all means reincorporate it into the article and tweak the lead as appropriate.
In the history of Western philosophy, essence has often served as a vehicle for doctrines that tend to individuate different forms of existence as well as different identity conditions for objects and properties; in this logical meaning, the concept has given a strong theoretical and common-sense basis to the whole family of logical theories based on the "possible worlds" analogy set up by Leibniz and developed in the intensional logic from Carnap to Kripke, which was later challenged by "extensionalist" philosophers such as Quine.
I made only formatting changes to the material on Buddhism and Hinduism because I am not competent to edit in this area. If you are, it would be great if you could take a critical look and consider adding a short paragraph to the article lead.
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