 But it could be disputed whether Socrates is existentially dependentR upon his life—whether he necessarily would not have existed if it had not—for it may be urged that he might have had or led a different life. Now, it is true enough that his life might have been qualitatively different in many ways, but what is currently at issue is whether he might have had a numerically different life—and it is hard, perhaps, to see how he could. For if it is accepted that lives dependR for their existence upon the persons whose lives they are, then, necessarily, x’s life exists only if x exists. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Socrates could have had a numerically different life: then it would still have been a life which could only have been Socrates’s—no one other than Socrates could have had that “other” life. But then what could underpin the supposition that it is indeed a life “other” than the life he actually had (except qualitatively)? Other possible worlds clearly do contain lives that do not exist in the actual world, insofar as they contain people who do not exist in the actual world: but there seem to be no strong grounds to suppose that they do so other than for that reason. It seems thus that there are certain difficult questions which the modal-existential analysis may not fully address, at least not in the form that we have presented it until now. We will continue to discuss these issues in  §3  and  §4.