Having principal typings (for short PT) is an important property of type systems. This property guarantees the possibility of type deduction which means it is possible to develop a complete and terminating type inference mechanism. It is well-known that the simply typed -calculus has this property, but recently, J. Wells has introduced a system-independent definition of PT which allows to prove that some type systems do not satisfy PT. The main computational drawback of the -calculus is the implicitness of the notion of substitution, a problem which in the last years gave rise to a number of extensions of the -calculus where the operation of substitution is treated explicitly. Unfortunately, some of these extensions do not necessarily preserve basic properties of the simply typed -calculus such as preservation of strong normalization. We consider two systems of explicit substitutions ( and se) and we show that they can be accommodated with an adequate notion of PT. Specifically, our re...