Alvin Plantinga

In this paper I propose an amendment to Chisholm's definition of individual essence. I then argue that a thing has more than one individual essence and that there is no reason to believe no one grasps anyone else's essence. The remainder of the paper is devoted to a refutation of existentialism, the view that the essence of an object X (along with propositions and states of affairs directly about x) is ontologically dependent upon x in the sense that it could not have existed if x had not existed.

The contributions in this volume make an important effort to resurrect a rather old fashioned form of foundationalism. They defend the position that there are some beliefs that are justified, and are not themselves justified by any further beliefs. This epistemic foundationalism has been the subject of rigorous attack by a wide range of theorists in recent years, leading to the impression that foundationalism is a thing of the past. DePaul argues that it is precisely the volume and virulence of the assaults which points directly to the strength and coherence of the position

Two kinds of critical questions have been asked about the propriety or rightness of Christian beliefs. The first is the de facto question: is Christian belief true? The second is the de jure question: is it rational, or reasonable, or intellectually acceptable, or rationally justifiable? This second question is much harder to locate than you’d guess from looking at the literature. In “Perceiving God” William AIston suggests that the (or a) right question here is the question of “the practical rationality,” construed as he construes it. I argue that the question is ambiguous: and one of the disambiguees is too easy to answer, while the other is such that its answer is really irrelevant to any sensible version of the de jure question. I conclude by venturing a suggestion as to what a sensible de jure question might be.

Philip Quinn’s “On Finding the Foundations of Theism” is both challenging and important. Quinn proposes at least the following four theses: (a) my argument against the criteria of proper basicality proposed by classical foundationalism is unsuccessful, (b) the quasi-inductive method I suggest for arriving at criteria of proper basicality is defective, (c) even if belief in God is properly basic, it could without loss of justification be accepted on the basis of other propositions, and (d) belief in God is probably not nowadays properly basic for intellectually sophisticated adults, There is much to be said about each of these four theses; I shall say just a bit about them. I take the fourth claim to be the most important and devote the most space to it.

Individuals is divided into two parts. In Part I, Strawson tries to show that there is an important sense in which material objects and persons are basic particulars. In Part II "the aim is to establish and explain the connexion between the idea of a particular in general and that of an object of reference or logical subject". Part II contains a wealth of interesting material and ingenious argumentation. Most important here, perhaps, is Strawson's attempt to provide criteria for distinguishing subjects from predicates and particulars from universals, and to show a philosophically important link between the subject-predicate distinction and the particulars-universals distinction. What he says on this head is of considerable interest indeed. Nevertheless, I shall deal only with Part I. First I shall recount and comment upon the argument for the view that material objects are basic; then I shall state and examine what Strawson has to say about persons in more detail.