 Offering (1) as an essentialist explanation would be to group it with (3), which might suggest rather different truth conditions for (1) than if it were offered as a grounding explanation. Prima facie at least, (3) does not explicitly require that Socrates’s having a certain man as a father be a more fundamental fact than him being the very individual he is. Moreover, it is widely held that the grounds of a fact are modally sufficient for it to obtain, but need not be modally necessary for it, while the opposite is true for essence, which would place rather different conditions on whether a claim like (2) is true as opposed to a claim like (3). Although a number of recent accounts of grounding analyze it in terms of essence (e.g., Correia 2013, Zylstra 2018), or vice versa (e.g., deRosset 2013, Gorman 2014), others do neither (e.g., Fine 2012, 2015). As a provisional matter, we shall treat grounding explanations as distinct from (yet perhaps related to) essentialist explanations and leave open for now whether instances of the one imply instances of the other.