Essence and Accident in a Formal Metaphysics of Actualization

A formal metaphysics of potentiality and actuality was developed in two previous articles. This paper presents the definitions of essence and accident based on a primitive relation of Being between domains and elements, independently of any relation of accessibility. The essence of a being is the extension of Being at the element of the being. Using the example of the number four, it is argued that properties such as being a natural number or being even are not fixed by the definition of four, but depend on the domains in relation to which the element four is.