By or in itself;
intrinsically;
belonging to the basic nature of a person or thing;
as, The writer was not a scholar per se and made many loose generalizations.

Finnish people may find this latin phrase a bit amusing as "perse" in Finnish is a fairly dirty word, same as "ass" in English. Per se may be seen as a syllabified version of the word. (Personally I like the Swedish hostname www.per.se too. =)

This is the name given to one of the two philosophies used by United States courts when dealing with antitrust cases. The per se rule states that the very existance of a (uncontrolled) monopoly is in itself a violation of antitrust laws and must be corrected. Although used for much of the twentieth century, this philosophy has been mostly replaced by the rule of reason.