all and only some things, there is a natural semantically primitive restricted quantifier
that ranges over all and only those things. But this is both strained and not
independently plausible.
Belief in many relatively fundamental existential quantifier expressions was offered
as a sufficient condition for belief in ways of being, and not as a necessary condition,
and a hard distinction between specific and individual existence does not falsify it.
But such a distinction does make it difficult to see how one can offer a more general
account of belief in modes of being that both covers views that embody this hard
distinction and generates the sufficiency condition just mentioned. In itself, the fact
that it is hard to come up with a fully general classification of ways of believing in
modes of being doesn’t matter much. There are many other philosophical views that
are really better thought of as families of views, some more loosely unified than
others.^68 Consider, for example, the dispute between endurantism and perdurantism
in the literature on persistence through time. It is an exaggeration to say that there are
hundreds of different formulations of“the endurantist view of persistence over time,”
but it feels sometimes like it is barely an exaggeration. I doubt that there is a criterion
of what it is to believe in endurantism that can be stated in terms of necessary and
sufficient conditions that can cover all these formulations. What seems to be the case
is this: there is a core intuition (or a small set of core intuitions) and there are many
possible ways to crystallize it (or them) in a formal statement of a view. And there is
some set of arguments that favor some form or other of endurantism without clearly
favoring any particular form. But when there are arguments that favor some par-
ticular version of endurantism over other formulations, the details of the particular
formulations matter. (Similar remarks apply to arguments against endurantism.)
The same is probably true of the doctrine that there are modes of being. For
example, the theological motivation for belief in modes of being that stems from the
claim that we cannot speak univocally of God and creatures doesn’t seem to favor
versions in which individual existence is analyzed in terms of specific existence over
versions in which they are both taken as given, or vice versa. Whether this is true with
respect to the other motivations is less clear. For example, it is an interesting question
whether the consideration from divine simplicity favors versions in which such a
distinction is drawn; but the answer to this question, as we will see, is that it does not.
According to Aquinas, in God there is no composition, and so in God, unlike in
creatures, there is no distinction between existence and essence. Godis(this is the
“is”of identity) his existence. Does it follow that his existence must be hisindividual
existence, and so we must draw a distinction between specific and individual
(^68) Spencer (2012) seems sympathetic with this line of thought. Caplan (2011) argues that attempts to
come up with a unified criterion for being a version of ontological pluralism are unlikely to succeed;
instead, probably“ontological pluralism”is itself a somewhat disjunctive notion. I’m comfortable with this
conclusion, as will become clear in thefinal section of this chapter.