 An account pairing essentialism with modal empiricism comes out of Antonella Mallozzi’s (2021a, 2021e) work. According to Mallozzi, we can clarify what the normative constraints on good modal reasoning are by appealing to essences. Specifically, she maintains that essences are special core properties that have distinctive explanatory powers in accounting for how things are—as she puts it, essences are superexplanatory. Mallozzi focuses on examples involving kinds and illustrates how essences typically cause and explain many properties and behaviors that consistently co-occur in the instances of kinds. For example, the atomic constitution of a chemical element, say silver, explains why all samples of silver share a whole host of properties, such as density, electrical and thermal conductivity, disposition to combine chemically, and so on. Atomic number is, thus, the essence or “nature” of silver, for Mallozzi, because of its powerful role in explaining the properties shared by all samples of silver. Accordingly, given  (FE),  silver necessarily has that atomic constitution. Against long-standing skepticism against essences, Mallozzi emphasizes that such superexplanatory one-to-many causal structures helps clarify in what sense essences are held to constitute the “nature” of things, as well as how we can know about them. (Godman, Mallozzi, &amp; Papineau 2020 further investigate the metaphysics of kinds in terms of superexplanatory properties, particularly for biological kinds.) Mallozzi gives a moderate empiricist answer to  question (a)  above. In most cases we acquire knowledge of essence empirically, largely via scientific investigation aimed at discovering the relevant causal and explanatory information. As to  question (b),  Mallozzi holds that once we have knowledge of essence, we may then proceed to gain knowledge of metaphysical necessity inferentially, via a fundamental Kripkean bridge-principle (“If \(X\) is essentially \(F\), then necessarily \(X\) is \(F\)”).