An important task for metaphysicians and philosophers of science is to account for laws of nature – in particular, how they distinguish themselves from ‘mere’ regularities, and the modal force they are endowed with, ‘natural necessity’. Dispositional essentialism about laws (for short: ‘essentialism’) is roughly the view that laws distinguish themselves by being grounded in the essences of natural entities (e.g. kinds, properties). This paper does not primarily concern how essentialism compares to its main rivals – Humeanism and Armstrongeanism. Rather, it distinguishes and comparatively assesses various brands of essentialism – which mainly differ as to where exactly they take laws to find their essentialist sources (e.g. in particular entities, like electrons, or in larger pluralities of entities, or in the world as a whole), and what they take to be the targets of laws, namely what they apply to. Yet, this internal comparison is not unrelated to the more general debate about laws: the main criteria with which I compare these essentialist views concern how they can deal with some of the main objections faced by essentialism in general (the modal status it typically attributes to laws, which some think is too strong; and its alleged incapacity to account for the most 'general' laws, like conservation laws), and how they can keep what is arguably the main intuitive advantage of essentialism over its rivals (the fact that, on this view, things “govern themselves”). Thus, the paper also concerns the relative position of essentialism in the larger debate about laws – ultimately bringing support to it.

形而上学家和科学哲学家的一项重要任务是解释自然规律——特别是，它们如何将自己与“纯粹的”规律区分开来，以及它们被赋予的模态力量，即“自然必然性”。关于法律的倾向本质主义（简称：“本质主义”）大致是这样一种观点，即法律通过以自然实体（例如种类、属性）的本质为基础来区分自己。本文并不主要关注本质主义与其主要竞争对手——休谟主义和阿姆斯壮主义的比较。相反，它区分并比较评估了各种本质主义品牌——它们的主要区别在于它们究竟在哪里采取法律来寻找它们的本质主义来源（例如，在特定的实体中，如电子，或在更大的多个实体中，或在整个世界中），以及它们作为目标的对象法律，即它们适用于什么。然而，这种内部比较与关于法律的更普遍的辩论并非无关：我比较这些本质主义观点的主要标准涉及它们如何处理一般本质主义面临的一些主要反对意见（它通常归因于的模态状态）一些人认为过于强大的定律；以及它据称无法解释最“一般”的定律，如守恒定律），以及它们如何保持本质主义相对于其竞争对手的主要直觉优势（事实上，根据这种观点，事物“自我管理”）。因此，本文还关注本质主义在关于法律的更大辩论中的相对地位——最终为其提供支持。