 One difficulty with this view is the failure to produce a single plausible example of such an essence. We saw that possibilist realism faces the problem of specifying non-actual possible objects. Plantinga’s version of actualist representationism faces its own version of the Quinean challenge, namely, the problem of specifying the individual essences which are supposed to replace non-actual possible objects. What individual essence did Julius Caesar have? What readily comes to mind is the property of being Julius Caesar. As Ruth Barcan Marcus and Kripke have forcefully argued (Barcan 1947, Marcus 1961, Kripke 1972), identity is necessary; that is, if an object x is identical with an object y, it is necessarily the case that x is identical with y. Given this, it is easy to see that Julius Caesar necessarily had the property of being Julius Caesar and everything other than Julius Caesar necessarily lacks it. However, it is implausible to suggest that this property is independent of Julius Caesar. Our canonical specification of it by means of the noun phrase ‘the property of being Julius Caesar’ certainly is not independent of our canonical specification of Julius Caesar by means of the name ‘Julius Caesar’, and this does not seem to be an accidental fact merely indicative of the paucity of our language devoid of deep metaphysical underpinnings. Kaplan’s automobile and Salmon’s Noman merely push the dependence of the individual essence to the level of the constituent parts or origin of the object of which it is an individual essence. This difficulty is magnified when we ask for a specification of an individual essence of Vulcan or Julius Caesar’s entirely new finger. For more on individual essence, see Adams 1981, McMichael 1983, Fine 1985, Menzel 1990, Lycan 1994, Linsky &amp; Zalta 1994, Plantinga 2003.