  Many reject the substance theory because they think it entails that something could exist without any properties whatsoever.  While substance theorists do claim that the basic bearers of properties are independent of those properties, being the entities in which properties are, in the first instance, instantiated, it does not follow from this that there is something that can exist without any properties at all. To see why, distinguish, first, an object's temporary properties (i.e., the properties it has at some times of its existence and not at others) from its permanent properties. As far as the problem of temporal qualitative variation goes, the constituent of a singular proposition with o as a constituent need not exclude its permanent properties and so need not be a completely bare particular, as the object instantiates those permanent properties whenever it exists.