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In the recently published "A Companion to Ayn Rand", in chapter 12, Gregory Salmieri takes on the task, and successfully so, of exploring and summarizing (with clarity and accuracy) Rand's Objectivist Epistemology. At page 293 Dr. Salmieri discusses "Rand's rule of fundamentality" and her concept of "essential characteristics" and the related concept of an existent's "kind": "The "essential characteristic" is the one "without which the units would not be the kind of existents they are" (42). Rand reinterprets this traditional Aristotelian idea in light of her view that concepts are objective rather than intrinsic. If kinds are not intrinsic features of reality, but objective products of human cognition, then the status of an existent as a member of a kind (i.e., as a unit of a concept) is not intrinsic but objective, and so there cannot be any characteristic of the units that, wholly independent of the mind and its needs, makes them members of the kind. Essences in Rand's view are epistemological rather than metaphysical. A person properly forms a concept that classifies the existents into a kind when he has observed that they are similar to one another. This initially observed similarity will typically be complex: it will include many related respects in which the units are like one another as opposed to other things..."[Emphases in Bold Added] This is just an example of the high quality, clarity, and accuracy of the work of its many contributors, and I encourage anyone interested in an academic treatment of Objectivism, Ayn Rand, and her ideas and works, to buy the book, and learn from its wealth of scholarship.