PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: A contemporary introduction

ARGUMENTS (2) 289

among these are reflections concerning the nature of persons. When he
thinks of triangles, bluebirds, or waffles, Descartes is thinking of kinds of
things to which he does not himself belong. Not so when he thinks of
persons. When he thinks about the nature of a triangle – what it is to be
one, or of a bluebird or a waffle, he does not think about his own nature;
not so when he thinks of what it is to be a person. His view is that he can
learn what it is to be a person by (i) noting what sorts of properties he
himself has – something introspectively accessible to him, and (ii)
reflecting about what properties he could exist without having and what
properties he could not exist without having – something conceptually
accessible to him.
Explaining his position in reply to an objection, Descartes says:

Everything in which there resides immediately, as in a subject,

or by means of which there exists anything that we perceive, i.e.

any property, quality, or attribute, of which we have a real idea,

is called a Substance.^18

Since he is aware of himself as having various qualities and being in
various states, he is introspectively aware of being a substance. Since
allegedly he knows that it is his essence to be self-conscious – he could
survive without any other features not identical to or entailed by self-
consciousness; without self-consciousness,^19 he does not exist – he
concludes that it is his nature as a person (and hence the nature of persons)
to be a self-conscious substance.

Jainism

A Jain text tells us the following:

The distinctive characteristic of a substance is being. Being is a

simultaneous possession of coming into existence, going out of

existence, and permanence. Permanence means the indestructi-

bility of the essence of the substance... substance is possessed

of attributes and modifications.... attributes depend upon sub-

stratum and cannot be the substratum of another attribute.

Modification is change of attribute.^20

A substance, we are told, has attributes – properties or qualities, if you
please. No attribute can exist that is not the attribute of some substance.
Things come into existence in the sense that substances come to have