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Plantinga on Existing Necessarily1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
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In The Nature of Necessity (Oxford, 1974), Alvin Plantinga asserts (1) that “the number 7 exists necessarily and Socrates does not.” (p. 212) This is, to my way of thinking, reasonable enough. Unhappily, (1) cannot be reconciled with Plantinga's further claims that (2) an object x has a property P essentially or necessarily (on page 14 Plantinga tells us that he employs these expressions “as synonyms”) if and only if x has P in every world in which x exists and (3) existence is itself, although not “an ordinary property,” nevertheless a property.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1976
Footnotes
1
I thank Professor Plantinga, Harold Levin, Robert Jaeger, Tom McKay, John Hooker, and John Bahde for criticisms of earlier versions of this paper.
References
2 “Of course we do sometimes assert negative existentials and sometimes we are right. What we assert, therefore, (at least on those occasions) are not singular negative existentials.” (p. 147)
3 I believe that Russell is committed to such a line in Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (chapter 16) and also Moore in Lectures on Philosophy, pp. 129-131.
4 This is Saul Kripke's line as well. See “Identity and Necessity,” in Identity and Individuation, edited by Munitz, Milton K. (New York, 1971), p. 145.Google Scholar