 Arguably neither of these problems is devastating. Those who favor the basic characterization can say that typically when someone claims, for example, that Emma is essentially a dog, what is really meant is not that Emma has essentially the property of being a dog, but instead that Emma has essentially the property of being a dog if existent. Existence will be treated specially on this approach: the claim that an object has existence as an essential property will not be taken as the claim that the object has as an essential property the property of being existent if existent; instead the claim will be taken at face value. Those who favor the existence-conditioned characterization can say that when someone says that only God has existence as an essential property, what is really meant is that only God has existence as a necessary property, where a necessary property of an object is a property that the object possesses in all possible worlds. (According to the basic modal characterization, an essential property is the same as a necessary property.) Both approaches may be faulted for making a special case of the property of existence. But that is not perhaps such a great fault, given that existence does seem to be a special case and that it is treated specially in other areas of philosophy as well. (It is perhaps worth pointing out that according to many philosophers—Kant, Russell, and Frege to name three—existence is not a property at all. If this is right, then existence is indeed a very special case.) In what follows, we shall not be concerned with the details arising from the need for some sort of existence condition—either in the statement of the definition of an essential property (as on the existence-conditioned modal characterization) or in the properties that are taken to be essential (as on the basic modal characterization). There are other ways of explaining the distinction between essential and accidental properties of objects in modal terms (to be discussed in §2), but what we have called the basic modal characterization and the existence-conditioned modal characterization are the standard ways. Together, usually indiscriminately, these amount to what we call the modal characterization.