In his Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews review of Elmar J. Kremer's Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God, Herman Philipse presents the following sketch of Miller's cosmological argument a contingentia mundi for the existence of God:
1. Existence is a real first-level accidental property of contingent individuals.
2. Concrete contingent individuals are distinct from their existence.
3. This distinction implies a paradox, unless:
4. All existing concrete contingent individuals are caused to exist by a necessarily existing and therefore uncaused individual that is identical with its existence, and this is God.
5. At least one concrete contingent individual exists, e.g., the dog Fido, or the universe.
6. Hence, God exists (from 1-5).
Philipse is unimpressed with the argument. He rejects (1) as well as (2)-(4). In this entry I will confine myself to a discussion of Philipse's rejection of (1), and indeed to just one of his arguments against (1).
It is obvious that Miller's cosmological argument cannot get off the ground unless existence is a property of contingent individuals in some defensible sense of 'property.' This is what Philipse appears to deny. He appears to endorse the Frege-Russell view according to which 'exist(s)' is always only a second-level predicate and never an admissible first-level predicate, where a first-level or first-order predicate is one that stands for a property that is meaningfully attributable to concrete individuals. On the Frege-Russell view, then, existence is not a first-level property, but a property of properties, Fregean concepts, Russellian propositional functions or some cognate item. But this dogma of analysis -- as I call it -- (i) flies in the face of the linguistic data and (ii) brings with it troubles of its own. (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75)
That we predicate existence of concrete individuals seems as obvious as anything. That we do so is a datum that ought to be presumed innocent until proven guilty of incoherence or contradiction. We predicate existence of individuals using proper names, demonstratives, pronouns, and pure indexicals as in 'Socrates exists,' 'This exists,' 'She exists,' and 'I exist.' 'Socrates' is a proper name. 'This' is a demonstrative. 'She' is a pronoun. 'I' is a pure indexical. Many of these first-level predications of existence are true. And if true, or false, then meaningful. This is evidence that 'exist(s)' functions as a meaningful first-level predicate in singular sentences such as 'Scollay Square no longer exists' and 'Copley Square still exists.' The linguistic data suggest that 'exist(s)' has a use as a meaningful first-level predicate in the the way that 'numerous' has no use as a meaningful first-level predicate.
(Bertrand Russell made a brave but unsuccessful attempt at assimilating existence to numerousness by arguing that, just as it would be the fallacy of division to argue that Socrates is numerous from the premises that he is a philosopher and that philosophers are numerous, it would also be the fallacy of division to argue that Socrates exists from the premises that he is a philosopher and that philosophers exist. Following Frege, he held that 'exist(s)' is never an admissible first-level predicate.)
Consider the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. It terminates in the proposition, sum, I am, I exist. The proposition is true, hence meaningful. First-level predications of existence would thus appear to be meaningful. When I think the thought that I exist, I attribute to myself the property of existence. This is prima facie evidence that existence is a property of individuals in a suitably broad sense of 'property.' Of course, when I say of a thing that it exists, I am not adding to its description or to the list of its quidditative determinations. So existence is not a property of individuals in that sense. The following is a non sequitur:
Existence is not a quidditative property of individuals.
Therefore
Existence is not a property of individuals at all, but a property of properties, the property of being instantiated.
It doesn't follow, because existence might be a non-quidditative property of individuals. The premise is obvious and contested by no one; but one cannot leap straightaway from it to the Fressellian doctrine which removes existence from individuals entirely and installs it at the level of concepts/properties/propositional functions.
It is well known, however, that certain puzzles arise if we treat 'exist(s)' as a genuine first-level or first-order predicate. And so a defender of (1) needs to be able to rebut the arguments against the view that 'exist(s)' is a genuine first-level predicate and existence a genuine first-level property. Philipse claims that if even one of these arguments contra is sound, then (1) cannot be sustained.
Let us consider a famous argument from Kant who is widely regarded as having anticipated Frege. Philipse writes,
Finally, does Miller succeed in refuting the Kantian argument to the effect that existence is not a real property? According to this argument, it is always possible to assert of one and the same entity (described by a list of its properties) both that it exists and that it does not exist. It follows from this plausible premise that existence cannot be a property (Critique of Pure Reason, A600/B628). Miller answers by stipulating that although existence is a real first-order property of concrete individuals, it differs from all other properties in two respects. First, existence does not add anything to what the individual is, and second, it does not add anything to an antecedent reality (p. 38). In my view, however, this stipulation amounts to changing the ordinary meaning of the term 'property', so that Miller's reply to Kant commits a fallacy of ambiguity. I conclude that Miller does not succeed in establishing that existence is a real accidental first-level property of concrete individuals.
This response is a total misunderstanding. Kant does not show that existence cannot be a property; what he shows, if he shows anything, is that it cannot be a real property where a real property is a determining property, and where "a determining predicate [property in contemporary jargon] is a predicate [property] which is added to the concept of the subject and enlarges it." (A598 B626)
Let the concept be cat. This relatively indeterminate concept can be further determined and made more specific by adding real or determining properties to it such as male, short-haired, black, five-years-old, and so on. Kant's point is that existence is not a property that could be added to this, or any, concept to further determine it. Existence is not a determining property. And in that sense it is not a real property. To predicate it of an individual leaves its whatness (quidditas) unaltered. Existence is not a quidditative determination.
Suppose the process of determination were taken to the max such that our cat concept becomes fully determinate in the sense that if anything in reality were to instantiate it, exactly one individual would instantiate it. The concept would then be so specific as to be individuating. But it would not follow that anything in reality does instantiate it. And if anything in reality were to instantiate it, then that individual would be quidditatively indistinguishable from the concept. The concept and its object, it there is one, would coincide quidditatively. (A599 B627) This is why Kant says that "the actual contains no more than the merely possible." The concept expresses the mere possibility of a corresponding object; whether there is a corresponding object, however, is an extra-conceptual matter.
You can see how this puts paid to the Cartesian ontological argument "from mere concepts." No doubt the concept of God is the concept of a being possessing all perfections. But even if existence is a perfection ( a great-making property in Plantinga's lingo) in God, existence is not contained in any concept we can wrap our heads around, and so cannot be analytically extracted from any such concept. Hence we cannot prove the existence of God by sheer analysis of the God concept. No concept in he mind of a discursive, ectypal intellect, not even the concept of God, is such that by sheer analysis of its content one could prove the existence of a corresponding object.
The point that Philipse misses is that Kant's claim that existence is not a real, i.e., determining property of individuals is consistent with Miller's claim that existence is a real, i.e., non-Cambridge property of individuals. Philipse mistakenly thinks that if existence is not a determining property of an individual, then it is not a property of an individual. That is the same non sequitur as was exposed above. If existence is not a quidditative property of individuals, it does not follow that that it is not a property of individuals, but a property of properties.
Kant's argument does not refute Miller's (1) above.
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