Maverick Philosopher

Once More on Whether Existence Could be a Property

This just over the transom from Samuli Isotalo:

 

I recently started reading your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence and the following kind of argument against the view that existence is a first-level property came to my mind. Probably you and many others have considered something like this, but I send it anyway.

 

Suppose existence is a first-level property and to exist is to instantiate this property. Now, given that some substance a instantiates some property P, we most likely want to say that this property P itself also exists. Thus, given that some substance exists, we want to say that the property, existence, it instantiates, also exists. But if to exist is to instantiate a property, existence, then it seems that in order for this property to exist, it needs to instantiate a further property, existence₂. But then we also want to say that this property, existence₂, exists, therefore it needs its own property, existence₃, and so on ad infinitum.

 

You make three points.

 

The first is that, if existence is a first-level property, a property of concrete individuals or substances, and if the existing of substance a is its instantiating of this property, then the first-level property of existence must itself exist. I agree.  For if existence did not itself exist, then neither a nor any concrete individual would exist.  This holds no matter to which category we assign existence.  No matter what existence itself is, were it not to exist, nothing would exist. But if you read me carefully, you will see that I resolutely deny that existence is a property (where properties are defined in terms of instantiation) of anything, whether individuals, properties, concepts, linguistic  expressions, worlds, . . . whatever.

 

Your second point is that if existence is a property of individuals, and existence itself exists, then there has to be a second property, existence_2, in virtue of whose instantiation existence₁ exists.  But this doesn't follow. For it may be that existence is a self-instantiating property, roughly in the way a Platonic Form is self-exemplifying.  (But we needn't digress into a discussion of Plato, his Forms (eide), participation (methexis) in Forms, the Third Man Regress, etc.)

 

Consider the property of being concrete. Is it itself concrete? No, it is abstract. Now consider the property of being abstract. Is it itself abstract? Yes. Therefore, the property of being abstract is self-instantiating. (Notice: I did not say self-exemplifying. A property is not an exemplar.). The same holds for other putative properties: self-identity is self-identical, causal inertness is causally inert, omnitemporality is omnitemporal. 

 

So why can't existence be self-instantiating? I am not saying that it is, but if it is, then, to your third point,  the infinite regress cannot get started. Note also that if properties are necessary beings, as many philosophers maintain, and if existence is a property of individuals, then too the infinite regress could not arise.

 

Thus, treating existence as a first level property leads to an infinite regress. Existence seems to always pass on to some further property, like a slippery piece of soap that one cannot catch. What if we say that the property existence itself just exists, without it instantiating any further property? Then it seems that we have arrived at a picture very much like the one you are endorsing, namely, existence itself as Paradigm. For then we have this one property existence, which alone exists without it pointing to anything further, and every other thing exists in relation to it, by participating in it or instantiating it. But then it seems that to call such a thing ‘property’ is misleading, for properties are ontologically posterior to substances. Now, this reminds a lot of Aquinas, when he says, e.g. in De Ente et Essentia that existence itself is to be understood as something absolute and every other thing as participating in it.

What you are missing is that I deny that existence is a property. So your criticisms do not touch my view. What I conclude, after  a complicated argument that I cannot here summarize, is that existence is more like a paradigmatic individual. It is not a predicable entity. It is more like the opposite of a predicable entity. It is not a property of individuals, properties, or anything else. As I said above, self-existent Existence, as that in virtue of which everything else exists, resembles a Platonic paradigm. You are right to catch the similarity to Aquinas, although my argumentation is wholly non-Thomistic. It is unlike any of his Five Ways. This because it it not based on an Aristotelian substance ontology, but on a fact ontology deriving from Gustav Bergmann and D. M. Armstrong.

What are Modes of Being?

The following has been languishing in my unpublished archives since December 2009. Time to clean it up and send it out. If it triggers a bit of hard thinking in a few receptive heads, and therewith, the momentary bliss of the sublunary bios theoretikos, then it has done its job. 

Don't comment unless you understand the subject-matter. 

..............................

Many contemporary philosophers are not familiar with talk of modes of being. So let me try to make this notion clear. I will use 'being' and existence' interchangeably in this entry. I begin by distinguishing four questions:

Q1. What is meant by 'mode of being'?
Q2. Is the corresponding idea intelligible?
Q3. Are there (two or more) modes of being?
Q4. What are the modes of being?

My present concern is with the first two questions only. Clearly, the first two questions are logically prior to the second two. It is possible to understand what is meant by 'mode of being' and grant that the notion is intelligible while denying that there are (two or more) modes of being. And if two philosophers agree that there are (two or more) modes of being, they might yet disagree about what these modes are.

With respect to anything at all, we can ask the following different and seemingly intelligible questions. What is it? Does it exist? How (in what way or mode) does it exist? This yields a tripartite distinction between quiddity (in a broad sense to include essential and accidental, relational and nonrelational properties), existence, and mode of existence.  There is also a fourth question, the Why question: why does anything at all, or any particular thing, exist? The Why question is not on today's agenda. 

My claim is that the notion that there are modes of being is intelligible, not that it is unavoidable. But we might decide that the costs of avoiding it are prohibitively high.  'Intelligible' means understandable.

What might motivate a MOB (modes-of-being) doctrine? I will sketch two possible motivations.

(show)

A. Suppose you have two theist philosophers. They agree that God exists and they agree as to the nature of God. But one claims that God exists necessarily while the other claims that he exists contingently. What are they disagreeing about? That there is a being having such-and-such divine properties is not in dispute. Nor is the nature of God in dispute. One might argue that the disagreement centers on God's Seinsweise, or modus essendi, or way of being, or mode of being. Those are four different phrasings of one and the same thought, the MOB thought, if you will.  The one philosopher says that God exists necessarily while the other says that God exists contingently. They are both talking about God himself, and not about a proposition about God. The one is saying that God exists in the necessary way while the other is saying that God exists in the contingent way.  Neither need deny that there is the proposition God exists, and neither need deny that an alethic modality attaches to the proposition. Thus the one philosopher needn't deny that the proposition God exists is necessarily true, and the other needn't deny that the proposition is contingently true. But both will insist that the alethic modality of the proposition needs an ontic ground, and that the ontic ground in in the being/existence of God.

A contemporary analytic philosopher who rejects the MOB doctrine can accommodate the difference between necessary and contingent beings by saying that a necessary being such as God exists in all possible worlds whereas a contingent being such as  Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds. So instead of saying that God exists in a different way than Socrates, he will say that God and Socrates exist in the same way, which is the way that everything exists, but that God exists in all worlds whereas Socrates exists only in some. The modal difference is reinterpreted as a difference in logical quantity! Whether an item is necessary or contingent becomes a question of the number of worlds in which it exists.  But this move involves quantification over possible worlds and raises difficult questions as to what possible worlds are. These are questions that cannot be evaded. 

(It is worth noting that a modes-of-being theorist can reap the benefits of possible worlds talk as a useful and graphic façon de parler without incurring the ontological costs. One can talk the talk without walking the walk.)

Presumably no one here will embrace the extreme modal realism of David Lewis, as set forth in his seminal On the Plurality of Worlds (Basil Blackwell, 1986) according to which all worlds are on an ontological par as maximal mereological sums of concreta. So one will be sorely tempted to take some sort of abstractist line (as Plantinga and van Inwagen do) and construe worlds as maximal abstracta of one sort or another, say, as maximal (Fregean not Russellian) propositions. (Plantinga speaks of abstract Chisholmian states of affairs in his The Nature of Necessity (Oxford UP, 1974), but that is a wrinkle we may here ignore.) But then difficult questions arise about what it is for an individual to exist in a world.  

What is it for Socrates to exist in a possible world if worlds are maximal (Frege-style) propositions? Answer: to exist in a world is to be represented as existing by that world. So Socrates exists in the actual world in that Socrates is represented as existing by the actual world which, on the abstractist approach, is the one true maximal proposition. (By definition, a proposition is maximal if and only if it entails every proposition with which it is consistent. It is clear, I hope, that whatever we take  possible worlds to be, they must be maximal: that much is built into the very notion of a world.) As for God, if he is a necessary being, then he exists in all possible worlds in the sense that all maximal propositions represent him as existing.  That is to say: no matter which one of the maximal propositions is true, that proposition represents God as existing.  

On the abstractist conception, then, worlds are maximal (Frege-like, and thus abstract) propositions, and the actual world is the maximal proposition that is true. Actuality is reduced to truth. On the 'mad dog' modal concretism of Lewis, every possible world is actual-at-itself, but no world is actual, simpliciter.  The abstractist world-conception avoids this unpalatable consequence,  but is itself  hard to swallow.  Why do I say that?

Veritas sequitur esse, truth follows being, so I am inclined to say that the abstractist approach has it backwards: the necessity of God's existence is the ground of each maximal proposition's representing him as existing; the necessity of God's existence cannot be grounded in the logically posterior fact that every maximal proposition represents him as existing.

To appreciate the issue, consider a simpler example. Does Milo exist because the proposition Milo exists is true? Or is the proposition true because Milo exists? By my lights, the latter! The truth-maker of Milo exists is existing Milo. He is the ontic ground of the proposition's being true. Is that not blindingly obvious?  But if that is obvious, then it should also be obvious that the contingency of the truth of Milo exists is grounded in the contingency  of Milo's existence.  Whence it follows that Milo's existing is in the mode of contingency, which implies that there are modes of existing/existence/be-ing/being.

Back to God.  The ground of the divine necessity, I say, is God's unique mode of being which is not garden-variety metaphysical necessity but aseity. God alone exists from himself and has his necessity from himself unlike lesser necessary beings (numbers, etc.) which have their necessity from God. The divine aseity is in turn grounded in the divine simplicity which latter I try to explain in my SEP article.

Summing up this difficult line of thought that I have just barely sketched: if we dig deep into the 'possible worlds' treatment of metaphysical necessity and contingency, we will be led back to an ontology that invokes modes of being.  It is because Milo exists-contingently that a proposition that says that he so exists is contingently true, and not the other way around. And similarly for God, mutatis mutandis. 

But I don't want to paper over the difficulties inherent in the position that I am sketching. Don't forget: I am an aporetician, first and foremost. My intellectual honesty requires it of me. On the line of thinking that I am sketching, metaphysical necessity, thought through, issues in a commitment to the divine simplicity, a notion which -- gulp!-- teeters on the borderline of incoherence (to the discursive intellect), if it does not topple over into incoherence. It issues in mysticism, not that that issuance is any refutation of it. But now we are in too deep to continue in this direction in this installment.

B. Consider now this thing on the desk in front of me. What is it? A coffee cup with such-and-such properties both essential and accidental. For example, it is warm and full of coffee. These are accidental properties, properties the thing has now but might not have had now, properties the possession of which is not necessary either for its identity or for its existence. No doubt the coffee cup exists. But it is not so clear in what mode it exists. One philosopher, an idealist, says that its mode of being is purely intentional: it exists only as an intentional object, which means: it exists only relative to (transcendental) consciousness. The other philosopher, a realist, does not deny that the cup is (sometimes) an intentional object, but denies that its being is exhausted by its being an intentional object. He maintains that it exists mind-independently.

What I have just done in effect is introduce two further modes of being. We can call them esse intentionale and esse reale, purely intentional being and real being. It seems that without this distinction between modes of being we will not be able to formulate the issue that divides the idealist and the realist. No one in his right mind denies the existence of coffee cups, rocks, trees, and 'external' items generally. Thus Berkeley and Husserl and other idealists do not deny that there exist trees and such; they are making a claim about their mode of existence.

Suppose you hold to a thin conception of being, one that rules out modes of existence. On the thin conception, an item either exists or it does not and one cannot distinguish between different ways, modes, kinds, let alone degrees of existence. How would an adherent of the thin conception formulate the idealism/realism controversy?

I will leave you with this question. For more on this topic, seem my Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis in Novotny and Novak eds., Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, 45-75.

What Exists Exists

A miserable tautology?

Plato, Power, and Existence

The return of the Eleatic Stranger.

Substack latest.

Theme music:  Barbara Lewis, Hello Stranger

EmmyLou Harris, Hello Stranger

The Latest from Peter van Inwagen

This just over the transom:

Dear Sir, 

Recently I have been looking for some work by Peter van Inwagen and found his recent book Being A Study in Ontology. I believe the subject could be very interesting to you, because, as far as I know, you have written several times on his ontological views (even if there is deep disagreements between his and yours ontological views). 

 

I hope you are doing well in this messy and unpredictable world. 

 

Kind regards, 

Miloš Milojević 

 

Dear Mr. Milojević,

 

Thank you for bringing this book to my attention.  I will try to persuade the editor of a journal to send me a review copy. Failing that, I will happily shell out 75 USD for a copy. The undisputed 'king' of the 'thin theorists,' van Inwagen is wrong about Being, but brilliantly wrong and a formidable adversary. 

 

I have addressed his views many times in these pages and a few times in print.  Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method is one; "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" ( in Daniel D. Novotny and Lukas Novak (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge. pp. 45-75. 2014.) is another.

 

Other articles of mine on Being and existence can be found via my PhilPeople page.

 

As for this "messy and unpredictable world," let's hope it holds together for a few more years. I see no reason to be optimistic, but I derive consolation both from philosophy and from old age. In the meantime we must do our part-time best to beat back the forces of darkness.  Only part-time, however, because this world is a vanishing quantity that does not merit the full measure of our love and attention. All things worldly must pass. "Impermanence is swift." (Dogen) "Work out your salvation with diligence." (Buddha)

 

Finally, Miloš, I  thank you for your correspondence over the years,

 

Bill

 

Musical addendum

 

If Harrison was the Beatle with spiritual depth, Lennon was the radical leftist shallow-pate, McCartney the romantic, and Starr the regular guy and good-time Charley.

Peter Geach on the Real Distinction I

Oceans of ink have been spilled over the centuries on the celebrated distinctio realis between essence (essentia) and existence (esse).  You have no idea how much ink, and vitriol too, has flooded  the scholastic backwaters and sometimes spilled over into mainstream precincts. Anyway, the distinction has long fascinated me and I hold to some version of it.  I will first give a rough explanation of the distinction and then examine one of Peter Geach's arguments for it.

1)  We can say first of all that the real distinction is so-called because it is not a merely conceptual or notional or logical distinction.  'Real' from the Latin res connotes something the existence of which is independent of finite minds such as ours. So the real distinction is not like the distinction between the Morning Star and the Evening Star. It is not a distinction parasitic upon how we view things, or when we view them, or how we refer to them or think about them.   The terms 'MS' and 'ES' express two different "modes of presentation" (Darstellungsweisen in Gottlob Frege's terminology) of one and the same massive chunk of extra-mental physical reality, the planet Venus.  So one might think that the real distinction between essentia and esse is like the distinction between Venus and Mars. Venus and Mars are not abstract modes of presentation but concrete entities in their own right.  Venus and Mars are distinct in concrete reality, not merely in conception, or distinct at the level of Fregean Sinn (sense).

2) But although the Venus-Mars distinction is a real distinction, the distinction between essence and existence cannot be like it.  For while each of the planets can exist without the other, essence and existence cannot each exist without the other in one and the same thing.  A thing's existence is nothing without the thing whose existence it is, and thus nothing without the thing's essence.  I hope it is obvious that the existence of this particular coffee cup from which I am now drinking would be nothing without the cup and thus without the cup's total or 'wide' essence.

3) A tripartite distinction has emerged: thing, existence of the thing, essence of the thing. A sentence ago I used the phrase 'wide essence.' Why?  Because 'essence' (quiddity, whatness) can be taken in two ways, one 'wide' the other 'narrow.' The wide essence encompasses all of a thing's quidditative determinations (Bestimmungen). We can think of wide essence as the conjunction of all of a thing's quidditative attributes. Socrates and Plato, for example, differ in their wide essences despite the fact that they are both essentially human and essentially rational, and univocally so, to mention just two of their essential, as opposed to accidental, attributes. For the one man is sunburned, let us say, while other is not.   So while they differ in their wide essences, they do not differ in their narrow essence: the two share their essential properties, being human, and being rational, and others as well.

4)  I said that it is obvious that the existence of a concrete individual  would be nothing at all apart from the wide essence of that very same concrete individual. How could the existence of Socrates, that very man, be anything at all apart from the ensemble of his attributes? The existence of a thing is not like the pit of an avocado that can be removed from the avocado and exist on its own.

It is rather less obvious, if at all obvious, that the wide essence of a concrete individual would be nothing without existence.  Why couldn't there be a wholly determinate individual essence that does not exist? Why couldn't it have been that before Socrates began to exist he was a wholly determinate individual essence?    His coming to exist would then be  the actualization of a pre-existent wholly determinate merely possible individual essence. On such a scheme when God creates, he does not create ex nihilo, out of nothing, but out of mere possibles.  He creates by conferring existence (actuality) upon  wholly determinate  individual essences which before their creation are merely possible items.

If, however, as Thomas maintains, creation is creatio ex nihilo, then the essence and the existence of a concrete individual are each nothing without the other. Here we take the Thomist line.

5) The essence and the existence of a particular individual are thus each dependent on the other but nonetheless really, not merely notionally or conceptually, distinct.  They are really distinct (like Venus and Mars, but unlike the Morning Star and the Evening Star) but inseparable (unlike Venus and Mars).  They are really distinct like my eye glasses and my head but not separable in the manner of glasses and head. So a good analogy might be the convexity and concavity of one of the lenses.  The convex surface of a particular lens cannot be without the concave surface of that very lens and vice versa, but they are really distinct.  'Convex' and 'concave' are not merely two different ways of referring to the same piece of glass. The distinction is not a matter of our projection, or imposition, or interpretation.  There is a real mind-independent difference.  But it is only  an analogy. If the distinctio realis is an essential structural determination of finite beings, it is presumably sui generis and only analogous to the distinction between convexity and concavity in a lens.

6) Now what reason could we have for accepting something like the real distinction?  Here is one of Geach's arguments, based on Thomas Aquinas, from "Form and Existence," reprinted in Peter Geach, God and the Soul (Thoemmes Press, 1994), pp. 42-64.  Geach's argument is on p. 61.  I'll put the argument in my own way.  In keeping with my distinction between the rationally acceptable and the rationally compelling,  I find the argument rationally acceptable, and I incline to accept it.  Unfortunately many others, including many distinguished Thomists, do not. And that fact gives me pause, as it must, given my commitment to intellectual honesty. (More fuel for my aporetic fire.)

Suppose you have two numerically distinct instances of F-ness.  They don't differ in point of F-ness, since each is an instance of F-ness.  But they are numerically distinct.  So some other factor must be brought in to account for the difference.  That factor is existence.  They differ in their very existence.  Since they differ in existence and yet agree in essence, essence and existence are really distinct. For illustration we turn to Max Black.

Max Black was famous for his iron spheres.  (Geach does not mention Black.) In a well-known article from way back, Black hypothesizes a world consisting of just two of them and nothing else, the spheres being alike in every relational and monadic respect.  In Black's boring world, then, there are two numerically distinct instances of iron sphere.  Since both exist, and since they differ solo numero, I conclude that they  differ in their very existence.  Since they differ in their existence, but agree in their iron sphericity, and in every other relational and non-relational feature, there is a real distinction between existence and essence in each sphere.

Suppose you deny that.  Suppose you say that the spheres do not differ in their very existence and that they share existence.  The consequence, should one cease to exist, would be that the other would cease to exist as well, which is absurd.

Existence Exists: Analytic or Synthetic?

 Recently over the transom:

I am A. Kashfi, Professor of philosophy from Tehran University, Iran.

I am currently engaged in studying your esteemed book A PARADIGM THEORY OF EXISTENCE. In this book, you argue that “existence exists”. Regarding this proposition, a question has arisen for me. I would be grateful to have your response.

Is this proposition analytical or synthetic?

If this proposition is analytical, its equivalent would be: "Existence is existence" or "Existent is existent," which, as it is evident, doesn't contain particularly useful information.

If this proposition is synthetic, it requires that the concept of “existence” be distinct from the concept of “existent”. I want to know what the distinction between these two concepts is. Here, which concept "other than existence" (note: distinct from existence), in accordance with the synthetic nature of the mentioned proposition, are we attributing to existence?

 

In other words, I understand the proposition "A tree exists", but what does the proposition "existence exists", (given the synthetic nature of this proposition), mean?

Yours sincerely, A. Kashfi

Thank you for writing, Professor Kashfi. Nothing in philosophy fascinates me more than the topic of Existence, and so it is with pleasure that I think through your questions.

To understand what I mean when I say that Existence exists you have to understand that I distinguish between existing items (existents) and Existence.  Thus I do not use 'existence' as some philosophers do to refer to existents collectively.  Nor do I mean by 'Existence exists' what Ayn Rand means by it. The distinction between Existence and existents, as I construe it, is motivated by (i) the apparent fact, evident to the senses,  that there are many existents but that (ii) these existents all have something in common, namely, Existence. Existence is one to their many as that in virtue of which the many existents exist. The distinction gives rise to several questions. Here are four. First, what is it for an individual existent to exist? Second, what is Existence itself in its difference from individual existents? Third, how is Existence common to existents? Fourth, does Existence itself exist?

Reinhardt Grossmann proffers a quick answer to the fourth question: How could it fail to? "If existence did not exist, then nothing would exist." (The Categorial Structure of the World, Indiana UP, 1983, p. 405) Of course, he is not talking about my theory, but his own. He goes on to say that it does not matter to which category you assign Existence.  Whatever Existence is, it must exist if anything is to exist. I argue in my book that Existence cannot be a first-level property and thus that it cannot be that existents exist by instantiating Existence, not that this is what Grossmann maintains. Suppose that I am wrong and that Existence is a first-level property, a property of individual existents, and that the latter exist by instantiating Existence.  Then surely that property would have to exist if anything exists. Here then is an example of a meaningful use of 'Existence exists.' If Existence is a first-level property, a property of individuals, then Existence must exist if anything is to instantiate it.

The distinction between existents and Existence is nothing new. In Aquinas it is the distinction between ens/entia and esse.  In Heidegger it is the distinction (ontologische Differenz) between das Seiende and das Sein. We also find it it Islamic philosophy. Fazlur Rahman, glossing Mulla Sadra, writes, "Existence is that primordial reality thanks to which things exist . . ." (The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra, SUNY Press, 1975, p. 28. Diacriticals omitted.)

Sadra is clearly distinguishing between the things that exist (existents) and that in virtue of which they exist, Existence. There are of course very important differences between the three thinkers mentioned, and between their views and mine. But there is a close affinity between my view and that of Aquinas, and a somewhat close affinity between my view and that of Mulla Sadra.   

For Aquinas, Existence itself exists as God: Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. I am using 'Being' and 'Existence' interchangeably. For Aquinas, then, God is (identical to) self-subsisting Being.  God is both Being (esse) and the supreme being (ens).  In my jargon, the God of Aquinas is the Paradigm Existent. God does have have esse; he is (identical to) esse. So the Paradigm Existent  is both Being (esse) and being (ens). That is equivalent to saying that Existence exists. 

Aquinas is saying that Being itself is. On my reading, he is making three interconnected claims. (1) Being is not other than every being, as it is for Heidegger. His is not an 'alterity' theory of Being.  (2) Being does not divide without remainder into beings. He rejects what I call radical ontological pluralism.  (3) God (self-subsistent Being) is not a being among beings; God is the being, where 'the' connotes uniqueness. See God: A Being among Beings or Being itself? Aquinas thus rejects an ontic conception of Being/God. Everything other than God is in a dependent and derivative way or mode. It is important to note that God for Aquinas is not only unique, but uniquely unique: unique in his very mode of uniqueness. If you understand what Aquinas is saying, then you will understand what I am saying when I say that Existence itself exists. Existence itself is Existence in its difference from the phenomenal existents which derive their existence from the Paradigm Existent.

'Ens' (being) is the present participle of the infinitive 'esse' (to be). This linguistic fact points us in a Platonic direction: phenomenal existents (you, me, my cats, the Moon, Trafalgar Square, my bicycle, its parts such as the chain, and its parts, the links . . .) participate in noumenal Existence. In virtue of this participation, phenomenal existents exist and form a unified plurality of existents. This plurality is no illusion. It is real, but derivatively real. What is derivatively real, however, is not ultimately real. I agree on this point and others with Plato, Aquinas, and Sadra.

Taking a further step in the Platonic direction, I will note that instead of 'Paradigm Existent' I could have used 'Exemplary Existent.' Both exemplars (paradigms, standards) and universals are ones-over-many, but an exemplar is not a universal. Universals have instances, but Existence has no instances.  Exemplification is not instantiation.

As for Sadra, if Existence is the "primordial reality," then this is tantamount to saying that Existence itself exists. For if Existence is real, then it cannot have a merely conceptual or mental status, as it would be if it were a product of abstraction, and if it is the primordial reality, then everything other than it is real in virtue of being dependent on it. As for Heidegger, while he too distinguishes Being from beings, he denies that Being itself is. Das Sein ist kein Seiendes! The overly triumphalistic subtitle of my book, "Onto-theology Vindicated" was meant to signal my opposition to Heidegger, whose critique of what he calls metaphysics is in part a critique of onto-theology. An onto-theological approach to Being avoids both the alterity view and the ontic view. But to explain this in any depth is beyond the scope of this response. See my Heidegger category for more on Schwarzwaldontologie. See also Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities.

Analytic or Synthetic?

I will now respond to Professor Kashfi directly. He asks whether 'Existence exists' is analytic or synthetic and finds difficulties either way. My short answer is that Kashfi's question is not relevant to my broadly Platonic view. His question, couched in Kantian terms, is modern; my theory, harking back to Platonic exemplarism, is ancient. His question presupposes that Being is a being among beings. But that I deny. Now to the details.

Immanuel Kant applies the terms 'analytic' and 'synthetic' to judgments (Urteile). In the simple categorical case, a judgment involves a relation between a subject-concept and a predicate-concept. Thus the judgment expressed by 'Bodies are heavy,' (Kant's example of a synthetic judgment a posteriori) relates the concept body to the concept heavy via the copula 'are.'  But there has to be more to it than this, Kant insists, since we need to know "in what the asserted relation consists." (CPR B 141) His answer is that the relation of subject-concept to predicate-concept in a judgment is grounded in the bringing-together of concepts in the objective unity of apperception.  It is this objective unity of apperception (self-consciousness) that is "intended by the copula 'is.'" (B 142) In  Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, section 22, Kant writes, "The union of representations (Vorstellungen) in one consciousness is judgment." If these representations are united in the consciousness of a particular person, then the judgment is "accidental and subjective." If, however, they are united in a "consciousness in general," then the judgment is "necessary and objective."  This consciousness in general is what in Critique of Pure Reason he calls the objective unity of apperception.

Kant's central problem, as explained in his letter to Marcus Herz, is this: On what ground rests the relation of that in us which we call representation to the object? A judgment is a representation composed of concepts which are themselves representations. Judgments purport to be true or objectively valid. Suppose I see a green tree and judge that the tree is green. The judgment purports to be true  whether I or anyone make it. The purport is that the tree is green in reality apart from us  and our subjective mental states. I have an empirical representation of  green and an empirical representation of tree.  What I don't have is an empirical representation of what the 'is' denotes.  I have no empirical representation of the copulative tie or, equivalently, I have no empirical representation of the existence of the green tree. (The tree is green if and only if the green tree exists.) So how do I know that the tree is green? How do I secure the objective validity of the judgmental representation? What is the ultimate ground of the synthesis of subject and predicate in the object?  What makes it the case that the judgment expressed by 'This body is heavy' is true independently of my particular mental state and thus true for all actual and possible finite cognizers? What assures me that the judgental purport is satisfied? This is Kant's problem. To put it oxymoronically, it is a classically  modern problem. (The modern period in the West begins with Descartes, 1596-1650.)

Kant's solution is a transcendentally idealist one. The ultimate ground of the synthesis of subject and predicate in the object is is supplied by the objective unity of apperception which is also the transcendental unity of apperception. This solution is fraught with difficulties. For me, the central difficulty is the one I tackled in my doctoral dissertation: what exactly is the status of this transcendental unity of apperception? But that is basically what Kant is maintaining: we, in our transcendental capacity,  constitute objects in their objectivity. For we are the source of the the objective synthesis that lends objectivity to judgments.

Whether a judgment is analytic (e.g., 'All bodies are extended') or synthetic ('This body is heavy'), all such judgments are about phenomenal particulars in space and time.  But neither Kant's transcendental unity of apperception nor my Paradigm Existent is a phenomenal particular in space and time. For Kant, the ultimate transcendental condition of anything's being an object is not itself an object among objects. Similarly, the The Paradigm Existent is not an existent among existents. It is no more such than the God of Aquinas is a being among beings. 

And so I say that the question 'Analytic or Synthetic?' is inappropriately asked of 'Existence itself exists.'

Kashfi writes, "If this proposition ['Existence exists'] is synthetic, it requires that the concept of 'existence' be distinct from the concept of 'existent'."  Kashfi thereby assumes something that I explicitly deny early on in my book, namely, that Existence is a concept. Concepts track essences. The concept triangle, for example, 'captures' the essence TRIANGLE. The existence of an existing thing, however, cannot be captured, grasped, 'made present to the mind'  by any concept.  Existence is trans-conceptual.

One reason is that existence is not essence. Another reason is that each existing thing has its own existence: Socrates' existence is his and not Plato's. The two philosophers differ numerically in their very existence. They differ numerically as existents. Thus their numerical difference is numerical-existential difference. But as Aristotle said (in Greek, not in Latin): Individuum qua individuum ineffabile est. Individuals as such are ineffable. That strikes me as obvious given that (i) there is and can be no concept that captures or grasps the haecceity (non-qualitative thisness) of an individual, and (ii) there are no haecceities except those of existing things.  (Pace Plantinga, there are no such metaphysical monstrosities as  uninstantiated haecceities.)  There are, in other words, no individual concepts. Definitions and arguments here and in the surrounding entries in the identity and individuation category.

Neither the existence of Socrates, the existence that is his alone and not possibly shared with any other existent, nor Existence itself in its difference from existents is a concept. My point is that Existence either in finite existents or in itself cannot be reduced to a concept. I am not saying that we have no concept of Existence; we do. It is just that the concept of Existence is the concept of something that is not and cannot be a concept.  Existence is in this respect like God. We have various concepts of God, but God is not a concept. Or do you think that a mere concept in a mortal's mind created the world? Similarly, do you think that that in virtue of which finite existents exist is a concept in a mortal's mind?  See The Concept GOD as a Limit Concept.

To understand what I mean by 'Existence itself exists,' you have to understand that Existence itself is like the Platonic Form/Idea, Humanity. The former, like the latter, is not self-predicable or self-instantiating: Humanity is quite obviously not human, nor a human. And because Humanity is not self-predicable, one cannot sensibly ask whether the predicate-concept human is analytically contained in the subject-concept Humanity or synthetically  attached to it. The Form/Idea Humanity exists by being (identical to) itself. Its Being is (identically) its self-identity unlike a particular human such as Socrates whose Being is not its self-identity. (If Socrates' Being were his self-identity, then he would be a necessary being, when in fact he is a contingent being.) The same goes for Existence in its different from existents: its Being is its self-identity, which implies that the Paradigm Existent is metaphysically necessary.

If Humanity were self-predicable (self-instantiating), then the Third Man Regress would be up and running. For if  'is human' is univocally predicable of both the Form Humanity and its phenomenal instance Socrates, then a second Form -- call it Humanity II -- would have to be introduced to explain what is common to both Humanity and Socrates. And so on into an infinite explanatory regress which, as explanatory, is vicious. (Sone infinite regresses are benign, e.g. the truth regress.)

The Form/Idea Humanity is a CASE of itself, but not an INSTANCE of itself. A case because Humanity  is not a universal what-determination abstractly common to particular phenomenal beings, but a paradigm or exemplar.  The standard meter bar in Paris might prove to be a useful analogy if you take it the right way (which is of course that way I want you to take it.) The standard meter bar is obviously not an instance of itself because it is a material particular, and such things do not have instances.  For the same reason, you cannot predicate the standard meter bar of itself.  The standard meter bar is nonetheless a case of itself in that it is a metal bar exactly one meter in length: it sets the standard by being (identical to) the standard.

Now the standard meter bar is a phenomenal particular relative to which other phenomenal particulars either measure up or fall short, whereas the Paradigm Existent is not a phenomenal particular.  This is a point of disanalogy. But if you understand how the standard meter bars functions as a paradigm, you should also be able to understand how Existence could so function, mutatis mutandis.

Can a Necessary Being Depend for its Existence on a Necessary Being?

Brian Bosse raised this question over the phone the other day. This re-post from February 2010 answers it.

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According to the Athanasian Creed, the Persons of the Trinity, though each of them uncreated and eternal and necessary, are related as follows. The Father is unbegotten.  The Son is begotten by the Father, but not made by the Father.  The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.  Let us focus on the relation of the Father to the Son.  When I tried to explain this to Peter the atheist, he balked at the idea of one necessary being begetting another, claiming that the idea makes no sense.  One of his arguments was as follows.  If x begets y, then x causes y to begin to exist.  But no necessary being begins to exist.  So, no necessary being is begotten.  A second argument went like this.  Begetting is a causal notion.  But causes are temporally precedent to their effects.  No two necessary beings are related as before to after.  Therefore, no necessary being begets another.

I first pointed out in response to Peter that the begetting in question is not the begetting of one animal by another, but a begetting in a different sense, and that whatever else this idea involves, it involves the idea of one necessary being depending for its existence on another.  Peter balked at this idea as well.  "How can a necessary being depend for its existence on a necessary being?"  To soften him up, I looked for a non-Trinitarian case in which a necessary being stands in the asymmetrical relation of existential dependency to a necessary being. Note that I did not dismiss his problem the way a dogmatist might; I admitted that it is a genuine difficulty, one that needs to be solved.

So I said to Peter:  Look, you accept the existence of Fregean propositions, items which Frege viewed as the senses of sentences in the indicative mood from which indexical elements (including the tenses of verbs) have been removed and have been replaced with non-indexical elements.  You also accept that at least some of these Fregean propositions, if not all,  are necessary beings.  For example, you accept that the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12' is necessarily true, and you see that this requires that the proposition be necessarily existent.  Peter agreed to that.

You also, I said to him, have no objection to the idea of the God of classical theism who exists necessarily if he is so much as possible.  He admitted that despite his being an atheist, he has no problem with the idea of a necessarily existent God.

So I said to Peter:  Think of the necessarily existent Fregean propositions as divine thoughts.  (I note en passant that Frege referred to his propositions as Gedanken, thoughts.)  More precisely, think of them as the accusatives or objects of divine acts of thinking, as the noemata of divine noeses.  That is, think of the propositions as existing precisely as the  accusatives of divine thinking.  Thus, their esse is their concipi by God.  They don't exist a se the way God does; they exist in a mind-dependent manner without prejudice to their existing in all possible worlds.  To cop a phrase from the doctor angelicus, they have their necessity from another, unlike God, who has his necessity from himself.

So I said to Peter:  Well, is it not now clear that we  have a non-Trinitarian example in which a necessary being, the proposition expressed by '7 + 5 = 12,' depends for its existence on a necessary being, namely God, and not vice versa?  Is this not an example of a relation that is neither merely logical (like entailment) nor empirically-causal?  Does this not get you at least part of the way towards an understand of how the Father can be said to beget the Son?

To these three questions, Peter gave a resounding 'No!' looked at his watch and announced that he had to leave right away in order to be able to teach his 5:40 class at the other end of the Valle del Sol.

Notes on Avicenna: Essence, Existence, and Creation

Time was when the Islamic world could boast world-class philosophers. The Persian Ibn Sina (980-1037 anno domini) was one of them. He is known in the West as Avicenna.  Translated into Latin, his works had a major influence on the philosophy of the 12th and 13th centuries and beyond. De Ente et Essentia of Thomas Aquinas is a well-known text that shows the Persian's influence.  In this entry I will discuss some of Avicenna's  positions in metaphysics as I understand them. My understanding is based on close study of Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Comments and corrections solicited. That Avicenna anticipates Alexius von Meinong is an idea I arrived at independently. (The exposition of this anticipation belongs in a separate post.)

1) Wilhelmsen credits Avicenna with raising a new question in philosophy: "How is existence related to the order of nature or essence?" (PSE, 40; cf. BSP, 40 ff.) What motivates the new question is the conviction that the world of beings is a world of creatures that owe their existence to a creator. If the Being or existence (esse) of a being (ens) is its being-created-and-sustained-by-God, then there must be a real distinction (distinctio realis) between existence and essence in the creature.  To exist is then not to be the same (Plato) or to be a substance (Aristotle). An existing thing is thus in some way 'composed' of essence and existence. Avicenna thus upholds a real distinction between essence and existence. (Is he the first to do so in the history of philosophy? I'm really asking!)  I myself understand the distinctio realis along the following lines. (Someone who knows Avicenna's texts can comment on how closely my understanding, which is fairly close to that of Aquinas, matches Avicenna's.) 

About anything whatsoever, including God,  we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?)  In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in a contingent existent such as my cat Max Black there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold. I am going to assume that Avicenna did not anticipate Giles of Rome.

Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the convexity-concavity distinction is real, not projected by us.  The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it. We acquire some understanding of the sui generis distinction only by analogy from mundane examples. 

2) A second Avicennian innovation is a distinction between modes of Being (esse) or modes of existence, different ways for an item to be or exist.   (That there are different ways of existing or different modes of Being  is a notion fiercely resisted by most contemporary analytic philosophers, but I am of the opinion that the MOB doctrine -- to give it a cute name -- can be plausibly defended quite apart from Avicenna's particular views. See Holes and Their Mode of Being and the entries in my modes of being category. See also "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds., in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75. One of the dogmas of analysis is that there are no modes of being.) The second innovation presupposes the first, the real distinction. The latter allows us to focus on the existence of the thing without conflating it with its essence or quiddity. We find this conflation in Aristotle for whom there is no difference between an F and an existing F, a man and an existing man, say. For Aristotle, then, there is no difference between Milo and existing Milo. Once one grasps the difference between the existence/existing of Milo and Milo, one can go on to ask how something like Milo exists, in what specific way he exists.  In the case of God and Socrates we surely want to say that God exists necessarily whereas Socrates exists contingently. Now it is not obvious, but it can be plausibly argued that this modal-logical  difference -- typically spelled out nowadays in analytic precincts by saying that God exists in all possible worlds whereas Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds -- is rooted in an ontological difference between two ways (modes) of existing.  If that is right, then it is not the case that God and Socrates exist in the same way, pace such luminaries as Alvin Plantinga and Peter van Inwagen and their numerous acolytes. (See my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002, Chapter One, Section 4, "Contingency and Necessity as Modes of Existence," p. 22 f.) Back to the Persian.

3) For Avicenna, there are two modes of existence; there are two ways for one and the same essence/nature to exist/be. The one way is universally in mente; the other is singularly in re. Thus one and the same essence (humanity) exists singularly in the man, Milo, and in the man Socrates, and so on, and universally in the mind of anyone who knows Milo or Socrates or any man to be a man. The first mode could be called esse reale, the second esse intentionale. So if essence is really distinct from existence, then essence is really distinct both from intramental (esse intentionale) existence and extramental existence (esse reale).

4) Given (3), it follows that an essence in  itself is neither mental nor extramental, neither universal (repeatable) nor singular (unrepeatable), neither one nor many, neither abstract nor concrete, neither predicable nor impredicable, and -- mirabile dictu -- neither existent nor nonexistent. The essence in itself is thus a third item, a tertium quid. (It looks very much like a Meinongian Sosein jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein! But Meinong goes on the 'back burner' for now.)  

In sum, there are two ways for an Avicennian essence or nature to exist: either in things outside the mind, or else in the mind, and one way for an essence to be (not exist), and that is to be absolutely or indifferently, or if you prefer, amphibiously (either on the dry land of the real, or in the water of mind).  It is here that the dialectic becomes tricky and 'aporetic.' For what I take Avicenna to be saying is that the essence or nature absolutely considered, i.e., considered in its neutrality or indifference to both intramental and extramental existence,  is in itself a non-existing mind-independent item.  That is to say: the essence an sich, the essence as a modally indifferent tertium quid, is not an artifact or product of our considering.  Its absoluteness and indifference does not derive from our absolute considering;  our considering is an absolute considering because that which is being considered IS (not exists) absolutely. Get it? 

Now to exist is to be actual, whether in minds or in things. So the essence or nature in itself which exists neither in minds nor in things, is metaphysically prior to actuality and is therefore a pure possibility. "It follows that pure nature is pure possibility for being in some order. Therefore the possible is prior to the actual in an absolute sense." (Wilhelmsen, 41) Gilson puts it like this: in Avicenna's world, "essences always remain, in themselves, pure possibles, and no wonder, since the very essence of essence is possibility." (BSP, 82)

5) It follows from (4) that essentia as pure possibility is no longer internally tied to esse as etymology would suggest inasmuch as essences in themselves are what they are whether or not they exist in either of the two modes in which they exist. Avicenna thus drives a wedge between essence and existence in such a way that existence can only accede to essences and is insofar forth only accidental to them. Existence 'happens' to them while they on their part remain indifferent to existence.  

6) You will recall that for Aristotle, accidents receive their being from (primary) substances (prote ousiai) and are nothing without them.  Thus if A is an Aristotelian accident, then A cannot exist apart from some substance or other, and indeed cannot exist apart from the very substance S of which it happens to be the accident. The Islamic thinker takes the Greek's substance-accident distinction and puts it to use in a highly creative way. Whereas accidents for Aristotle derive their being from the substances of which they are the accidents, the Being (esse) of creatures is reduced by Avicenna to an accident of essences which, in themselves, as pure possibles, are beyond existence and nonexistence.

7) (6) entails interesting consequences for the notion of divine creation.  On an Avicennian scheme, creation is actualization of the merely possible.  If so, God does not create ex nihilo, but ex possibilitate. He doesn't create out of nothing; he creates out of possibles. This does not comport well with divine sovereignty. If God is sovereign, he is sovereign over all orders, including the order of the merely possible.  On the Avicennian scheme God is constrained by the ontologically prior order of mere possibles. He is therefore not free. Or at least he is no free in the libertarian sense of 'free.'

8) We have landed in a curious dialectical predicament.  On the one hand, we need the real distinction to make sense of divine creation ex nihilo.   The pagan philosophers didn't have it or need it, because their systems were not informed by divine revelation.  Aristotle's God is not a creator but merely a prime mover. His primary substances exist just in virtue of being the substances they are. For Aristotle, for a primary substance S of kind K to exist is just for S to be a member of K.  For Socrates to exist is just for Socrates to be a man. Hence there is no need for a real distinction between Socrates and his existence.  On the other hand, the Avicennian scheme, which needs the real distinction, fails to safeguard the absolute sovereignty and freedom of God and fails to capture the radicality of creatio ex nihilo. The reason, again, is that Avicenna's God creates, not out of nothing, but out of possibilities.  He is thus not a creator in the strict sense, but a mere actualizer of mere possibles that ARE independently of his will. (Cf. BSP, 83)

Some Questions about Existence, Part I

Pat F. inquires:

Your theory is that existence is the unity of a thing’s constituents. What I wasn’t entirely clear on is just what those constituents are. In one section of your book, you argue for the real distinction between essence and existence, which gave me the impression that existence was a constituent (rather than, as Miller would say, a component) along with essence (which seems to me the traditional compositional analysis);however, elsewhere you deny existence is a constituent. I am sure the misunderstanding is on my part, but clarification would be most helpful.

My question at the beginning of the book is: What is it for a concrete contingent individual to exist? My cat Max is an example of a concrete individual. Max exists. Nothing can exist without properties. So Max has properties. Some are essential, some are accidental, some are monadic, and some are relational. Take the conjunction of all of these properties and call it the wide essence or quiddity (whatness) of Max.  Now one of my claims is that existence is not included in the wide essence of any contingent being. (Max is of course a contingent being which is to say that, although he exists, at every moment at which he exists his nonexistence is possible.) At the same time, though, existence is predicable of Max: 'exists' is an admissible first-level predicate, pace the 'Fressellians.' Barry Miller and I agree about this.  

I have said enough to motivate  a version of the famous distinctio realis, the real distinction of essence and existence. About anything whatsoever we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?)  In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in Max there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold. 

Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the distinction is real, not projected by us.  The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it.   

So, to answer the reader's first question, while I do hold to some version of the real distinction, I do not maintain that the existence of a contingent being is a constituent thereof. The existence of a contingent being is not a spatial, temporal, or ontological part of it. It is the contingent unity or contingent togetherness of all of its ontological parts; it could not possibly be one of them. The whole thing exists; the existence of the thing cannot be assigned to one proper part thereof. I believe I call this "The holism of existence" in my book.

To get some idea of what an ontological part might be, consider a bundle theory of ordinary concrete particulars. The ontological parts are the properties, whether universals or tropes, the bundling of which constitutes the particular. The existence of an ordinary particular, Max, for example, would then be the contingent compresence of the properties, where the compresence of the properties is not itself a property. (Exercise for the reader: explain why compresence cannot itself be a property or a relation.) 

Now the bundle-approach is not the approach to constituent ontology that I espouse in my book, but it is in some ways similar.  In my book I assay ordinary particulars as concrete facts, taking Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong as inspirations.  The latter's thick particulars are facts of the form a's being F, where F is a maximal conjunction of properties and a is a thin particular. On this assay, my beloved Max has as ontological constituents a thin particular and a maximal bunch of properties construed as universals.  The existence of Max then turns out to be the peculiar fact-making contingent unity of all of his  ontological constituents, a unity that equips him to serve as the truth-maker of all the wonderful truths (true truth-bearers) about him.

There is a problem with this view and it is similar to the mess the hylomorphic constituent ontologists get into when they find that they have to posit materia prima which is, arguably, a Grenzbegriff if not an Unbegriff. 

Philosophically Salient Senses of 'See'

This entry is relevant to my ongoing discussion with Dr. Buckner.

It is plain that 'sees' has many senses in English.  Of these many senses, some are philosophically salient.  Of the philosophical salient senses, two are paramount.  Call the one 'existence-entailing.'  (EE) Call the other 'existence-neutral.' (EN)  On the one, 'sees' is a so-called verb of success.  On the other, it isn't, which not to say that it is a 'verb of failure.'  

EE:  Necessarily, if subject S sees x, then x exists.

EN:  Possibly, subject S sees x, but it is not the case that x exists.

Now one question is whether both senses of 'see' can be found in ordinary English.  The answer is yes.  "I know that feral cat still exists; I just now saw him" illustrates the first.  "You look like you've just seen a ghost"  illustrates the second.  If I know that the feral cat exists on the basis of seeing him, then 'sees' (or a cognate thereof) is being used in the (EE) sense as a 'verb of success.'  If ghosts do not exist, as I am assuming, then one who sees a ghost literally sees something that does not exist.  We call this second sense of 'sees' the phenomenological sense.  

So far, I don't think I've said anything controversial.  I have simply pointed out two different senses and thus two different uses of 'sees' in ordinary, non-philosophical English.

We advance to a philosophical question, and embroil ourselves in controversy, when we ask whether, corresponding to the existence-neutral sense of 'sees,' there is a type of seeing, a type of seeing that does not entail the existence of the object seen.  One might grant that there is a legitimate use of 'sees' (or a cognate thereof) in English according to which what is seen does not exist without granting that in reality there is a type of seeing that is the seeing of the nonexistent.

One might insist that all seeing is the seeing of what exists, and that one cannot literally see what does not exist.  So, assuming that there are no ghosts, one cannot see a ghost.  As Joe Biden might say, "Come on man, you can't see what ain't there!"

But suppose a sincere, frightened person reports that she has seen a ghost of such-and-such a ghastly description.  Because of the behavioral evidence, you cannot reasonably deny that the person has had an  experience, and indeed an object-directed (intentional) experience.  You cannot deny, given her fear-indicating behavior, verbal and non-verbal, that she had a visual experience as of  something ghastly. You cannot reasonably say, "Because there are no ghosts, your experience had no object."  For it did have an object, indeed a material (albeit nonexistent) object having various ghastly properties. After all, she saw something, not nothing. Not only that, she saw something quite definite with definite properties.  She didn't see Casper the Friendly Ghost but a ghastly ghost.

You might object, "No, she merely thought she saw something." But there was no thinking or doubting or considering going on; she saw something and it scared the crap out of her.

This example suggests that we sometimes literally see what does not exist, and that seeing therefore does not entail the existence of that which is seen.  If this is right, then the epistemologically primary sense of 'see' is given by (EN) supra.  If so, then problems arise for realism about the external world. For example, how do I know that the tree I see in good light (etc.) exists in itself whether or not I or anyone see it? 

Henessey's response:  "I grant the reality of her experience, with the reservation that it was not an experience based in vision, but one with a basis in imagination, imagination as distinguished from vision."  The point, I take it, is that what we have in my example of a person claiming to see a ghost is not a genuine case of seeing, of visual perception, but a case of imagining.  The terrified person imagined a ghost; she did not see one.

I think Hennessey's response gets the phenomenology wrong.  Imagination and perception are phenomenologically different.  For one thing, what we imagine is up to us: we are free to imagine almost anything we want; what we perceive, however, is not up to us.  When Ebeneezer Scrooge saw the ghost of Marley, he tried to dismiss the apparition as "a bit of bad beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of an underdone potato," but he found he could not.  Marley: "Do you believe in me or not?"  Scrooge: "I do, I must!"  This exchange brings out nicely what C. S. Peirce called the compulsive character of perception.  Imagination is not like this at all.  Whether or not Scrooge saw Marley, he did not imagine him for the reason that the object of his experience was not under the control of his will.

The fact that what one imagines does not exist is not a good reason to to assimilate perception of what may or may not exist to imagination.

Second, if a subject imagines x, then it follows that x does not exist.  Everything imagined is nonexistent.  But it is not the case that if a subject perceives x, then x does not exist.  Perception either entails the existence of the object perceived, or is consistent with both the existence and the nonexistence of the object perceived.

Third,  one knows the identity of an object of imagination simply by willing the object in question.  The subject creates the identity so that there can be no question of re-identifying or re-cognizing an object of imagination.  But perception is not like this at all.  In perception there is re-identification and recognition. Scrooge did not imagine Marley's ghost for the reason that he was able to identify and re-identify the ghost as it changed positions in Scrooge's chamber.  So even if you balk at admitting that Scrooge saw Marley's ghost, you ought to admit that he wasn't imaging him.

I conclude that Hennessey has not refuted my example. To see a ghost is not to imagine a ghost, even if there aren't any.  Besides, one can imagine a ghost without having the experience that one reports when one sincerely states that one has seen a ghost.  Whether or not this experience is perception, it surely is not imagination.

But I admit that this is a very murky topic! 

Existence, Time, Property-Possession, and the Dead

Here are four propositions that are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. 

1) For any x, temporal or atemporal, if x has a property, then x exists.

2) For any temporal x, if x exists, then x exists at present.

3) Frege, a temporal item, does not exist at present.

4) Frege has properties at present.

(1) is plausible: how could anything have a property if it is not 'there' to have it? This use of 'there' is non-locative.  I assume that to exist = to be, and that Meinongian nonentities, "beyond being and nonbeing," are unintelligible.

(2) is plausible: the past is no longer, the future not yet; the present alone is real/existent!  It is important to note, however, that the plausibility of (2) is not that of a tautology. Tautologies are plausible in excelsis; substantive metaphysical claims are not. One cannot reasonably controvert a tautology; one can reasonably controvert a substantive metaphysical claim. What (2) formulates, call it 'presentism,' is somewhat plausible but surely not logically true. So the senses of 'exist(s)' and 'exist(s) at present' are distinct. If I say that a thing exists, I say nothing about when it exists; I say only that it is 'there' in the non-locative sense among the 'furniture of the world.' Indeed, 'x exists' leaves open whether the thing is in time at all. 'God exists' is noncommittal on the question whether God is temporal or atemporal. 

(3) is plausible: (a) Frege is temporal in that he cannot exist without existing in time; (b) Frege does not now exist.

(4) is plausible: Frege is now famous and he is dead. Those predicates are true of him: he has (instantiates) the properties they express. 

The tetrad is collectively inconsistent. One way to solve the problem is by rejecting the least plausible proposition. By my lights, that proposition is (2). To reject (2) is to reject presentism. But if presentism is false, it does not follow that eternalism is true!  

Memory and Existence: An Aporetic Tetrad

Try this  foursome on for size:

1) Memory is a source of knowledge.

2) Whatever is known, exists.

3) Memory includes memory of wholly past individuals and events.

4) Whatever exists, is temporally present.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  To appreciate the logical inconsistency, note that 'exists' in (2) and in (4) have exactly the same sense, and that this is not the present-tensed sense.  It is the tense-neutral and time-independent sense. Something that exists in this sense simply exists: it is one of the things listed in the ontological inventory.  Hence talk in the literature of existence simpliciter.  In both of its occurrences above, 'exists' means: existence simpliciter.

The limbs are individually plausible. But they are not equally plausible. (4) is the least plausible, and thus the most rejectable, i.e., the most rejection-worthy. Rejecting it, we arrive at an argument against presentism given that (4) is a version of presentism, which it is.

1*) Some of what is remembered is known.

2*) All that is known, exists.

Therefore

2.5) Some of what is remembered exists.

3*) All of what is remembered is wholly past.

Therefore

3.5) Some of what exists is wholly past.

Therefore 

~4*) It is not the case that whatever exists, is temporally present. (Presentism is false.)

On whether an individual is identical to its existence

This just over the transom:

Good day Dr. Vallicella,

 

I was reading your book on existence, and on page 71, there is this argument for the real distinction between an individual's essence and its existence:

 

"[I]f in a essence and existence are identical, then a's essence entails a's existence. But that is to say that a is a necessary being... [this] implies that every individual is a necessary being, which is absurd."

 

I've reconstructed this as follows, and it seems one can object to premise (2):

 

(1) If a's existence is identical to a's essence, then a's essence entails a's existence. 

(2) If a's essence entails X, then a is necessarily X. 

(3) Therefore, if a's existence = a's essence, then a necessarily exists. 

(4) a is a contingent being. 

(5) No contingent being can exist necessarily. 

(6) Therefore, a's existence is not identical to a's essence.

 

(2) seems ambiguous. We can say that a can be necessarily X absolutely or conditionally. Put in terms of possible worlds, a is necessarily X absolutely if a is X in all possible worlds, while a is necessarily X conditionally if a is X only in all worlds where a exists. 

 

BV: I accept your distinction, but I would couch it in different terms, terms in keeping with standard practice. Let the free variable 'x' range over individuals.  To say that x is essentially F (where 'F' is a predicate that picks out a property) is to say that x is F in every possible world in which x exists. To say that x is accidentally F is to say that x is F in some, but not all, of the possible worlds in which x exists. To say that x is necessarily F is to say that (i) x is essentially F, and that (ii) x exists in every possible world.  

If we read (2) in terms of absolute necessity, then (2) is false–just because a triangle's essence entails being three-sided, it doesn't follow that triangles exist in all possible worlds. 

 

BV:  If you are talking about  particular  material triangles, a triangular piece of metal for example, then it it is true that they do not exist in all worlds.  And this despite the fact that every triangle is essentially three-sided.  But what I mean by the essence of a concrete contingent individual such as a triangular piece of metal is the whatness or quiddity of that very individual minus its existence. Recall that I distinguish between wide and narrow senses of 'essence' on p. 68:

 

'Essence' is here employed in a wide sense to denote the conjunction of those properties that make up what a thing is, and not in the narrow sense according to which a thing's essential (as opposed to accidental) properties are those it cannot fail to possess. Thus in the wide sense of 'essence' being sunburned now is part of my essence, even though I might not have been sunburned now. Thus [both] narrowly essential and accidental properties (whether monadic or relational) are part of my wide essence. 

So consider that triangular piece of metal. It exists, and it exists contingently, which is to say -- avoiding possible worlds jargon -- that it is possibly such that it does not exist. It might not have existed: there is no metaphysical necessity that it exist.  But if the existence of x and the wide essence of x are one and the same -- as the 'no difference theory' implies -- then our triangular piece of metal exists just in virtue of its being what it is. That is equivalent to saying that its possibility entails its actuality, which is the definition of a necessary being. But that piece of metal is surely no necessary being. So I conclude that there is a real distinction between wide essence and existence in it and in every contingent being.  What I argue in the book is that the metaphysical contingency of a contingent being is rooted in the real distinction.

If we read (2) in terms of conditional necessity, then (2) is true–a triangle is three-sided only in worlds where it exists–but this would render (6) false, since something can exist necessarily in a conditional sense and still be a contingent being.

 

It is certainly true -- to put it my way -- that a thing can have an essential property and "still be a contingent being."  But this is not relevant to what I am saying.

 

You must bear in mind that I deny  that existence is a property where P is a property =_df P is possibly such that it is instantiated.   Your argument above seems to miss this important point. You seem to be assimilating existence to a property.  We rightly distinguish essential and accidental properties, but existence is neither an essential nor an accidental property.

 

The existence of x  is just too basic to be a property of  x, but not so basic as to be identical to x!

Is this a fair reconstruction of your argument, and if so, how can the above objection be addressed?

 

I would say that you haven't grasped by argument. Comments are enabled in case you have a rejoinder. 

 

Thank you for your time.

Best,

M. L. Pianist

 

Thank you for writing, M. L.

 

 

Back to Time, Tense, and Existence

What follows is a comment by David Brightly which just came in but is buried in the comments to an old entry.  I have added my responses in blue.

..............................

I have just spotted that you quote EJL as saying,

This, of course, raises the question of how we can so much as talk about Caesar now that he no longer exists simpliciter -- how we can speak about 'that which is not.'

My understanding is that 'no longer' is a marker of a tensed verb. So Lowe appears to be using 'to exist simpliciter' as if it were tensed. This leaves me somewhat confused. I'm not at all sure that 'simpliciter' adds (or subtracts) anything here. Lowe's paragraph, minus the 'simpliciter', makes sense as ordinary tensed English.

BV: As you see it, David, 'Caesar no longer exists' and 'Caesar no longer exists simpliciter' express exactly the same thought.  That same thought is expressed by 'Caesar existed but Caesar does not exist (present tense). 'Simpliciter' adds nothing to 'exists.'

I suppose that you will say that the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing -- how can we speak about 'that which is not' when that which is not is not 'there' to be spoken of -- is a pseudo-problem, at least when raised with respect to wholly past items.  I suppose that you will say that we can now refer to Caesar because he existed, and that nothing more need be said. Your view, I take it, is that Caesar can, at the present time, be an object of successful reference and a logical subject of true predications without existing simpliciter or tense-neutrally. It suffices for successful reference to Caesar who is now nothing that he was something, i.e., that he existed. You might take it a step further and argue that the Platonic pseudo-problem arises from a failure to stick to ordinary tensed English, and that the 'problem' is dissolved (as opposed to solved) by simply using the tenses of our beloved mother tongue in their ordinary work-a-day ways and not allowing language to "go on holiday" (Wittgenstein).

To put words in your mouth: you are saying that there is no genuine problem about the reality of the past; said reality  consists solely in the fact that we can use the past tense to make true statements, e. g., 'Churchill smoked cigars.'

Have I understood your position?  If I have, then what we are really discussing is whether the debate that divides presentists and 'eternalists' is a genuine debate or instead a pseudo-debate sired by a misuse of language. 

Also, further down you say,

However things stand with respect to the future, the past surely seems to have a share in reality.

Could you not have said '...the past seems to have had a share...'? Again,

The question is whether what WAS has a share in reality as opposed to being annihilated, reduced to nothing, by the passage of time. [my emphasis]

BV: I don't say it your way because I believe that 'existence simpliciter' has a specific, non-redundant use.  I believe that one can sensibly ask whether what exists (present tense) exhausts what exists simpliciter.  I believe that both of the following are substantive claims:

a) Only what exists (present tense) exists!  

b) It is not the case that only what exists (present tense) exists!

For me, (a) is not a tautology, and (b) is not a contradiction.  Why not? Because, for me,  if x exists simpliciter, it does not follow that x exists (present tense).  So if (a) is true, it is true as a matter of metaphysics, not as a matter of formal logic. And if  (a) is false, it is not false as a matter of formal logic but as a matter of metaphysics.

You, David, do not admit the distinction between what exists (present tense) and what exists simpliciter.  For you, 'exists simpliciter' collapses into 'exists' (present tense).  

You then return to the truthmaker objection. It seems to me quite natural and unproblematic to say that the past both had a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing. Problems only appear when we say the past both has a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing.

BV:  But of course I don't say that. It is contradictory to say that the past has a share in reality and has been reduced to nothing.  I say that there are very good reasons to hold that the past is not nothing, that is is real (actual, not merely possible; factual not fictional) but merely lacks temporal presentness.

Suppose that a certain building B has been completely demolished. On your view B has been reduced to nothing.  All will agree that B is now nothing. But you want to say more. You want to say that what is now nothing is nothing sans phrase (without qualification). You want to say that what is nothing now is nothing without any temporal qualification.   Can you prove that?  Can you refute the view that wholly past items, which by definition are nothing now, have (tenselessly) a share in reality?  Can you prove that the past -- past times, past events, processes, continuants, etc. -- are simply nothing as opposed to nothing now?  

The past is arguably actual, not merely possible, and factual, not fictional. If so it is (tenselessly) real, and therefore not nothing. The passage of time does not consign what has become wholly past to nothingness.  Can you refute this view? I grant that it has its own problems. The main problem, as it seems to me, is to specify what it means to say that a temporal item -- an item in time -- exists tenselessly. 

My view is that these problems about the relation of time and existence are genuine but insoluble. Your view, I take it, is that the problems are pseudo-problems susceptible of easy dissolutions if we just adhere to ordinary ways of talking.

Have I located the bone of contention? Or have I 'dislocated' it? (A pun I couldn't resist.)

Among the Riddles of Existence

Among the riddles of existence are the riddles that are artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. This is one way into philosophy. It is the way of G. E. Moore. What riddled him was not the world so much as the strange things philosophers such as F. H. Bradley said about it.  

If the Moorean way were the only way, there would be no philosophy. Moore was very sharp but superficial. Yet you cannot ignore him if you are serious about philosophy.  For you cannot ignore surfaces and seemings and the sense that is common. Bradley, perhaps not as sharp, is deep.  I am of the tribe of Bradley. Temperament and sensibility play major roles in our tribal affiliation as our own William James would insist and did insist in Chapter One of his Pragmatism with his distinction between the tender-minded and the tough-minded.

The entry to which I have just linked has it that the tender-minded are dogmatic as opposed to skeptical. Bradley, though tender-minded, is not. He is avis rara, not easily pigeon-holed. He soars above the sublunary in a manner quite his own.  On wings of wax like Icarus?  Like Kant's dove?  Said dove soars through the air  and imagines it could soar higher and with less effort if there were no air to offer resistance.  But the dove is mistaken.  The dove on the wing does not understand the principle of the wing, Bernoulli's principle.  Is the metaphysician  like the dove? The dove needs the air to fly. Can the metaphysician cut loose from the sensible and sublunary and make the ascent to the Absolute?

In the face of temperament and sensibility argument comes too late. 

Bradley and James seem to agree on the latterliness of argument. In the preface to Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, Bradley quotes from his notebook:

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct. (p. x)

But why 'bad'? If I could speak to Bradley's shade I would suggest this emendation:  

Metaphysics is the finding of plausible, though not rationally compelling, reasons for what we believe upon instinct . . . .

Nietzsche too can be brought in: "Every philosophy is its author's Selbsterkenntnis, self-knowledge." 

As for Moore, is he the real deal? My young self scorned him. No true philosopher! He gets his problems from books, not from the world! The young man was basically right, but extreme in the manner of the young.   I have come to appreciate Moore's subtlety and workmanship.

Singular Concepts and Singular Negative Existentials

A re-post  from 15 May 2012. Reproduced verbatim.

........................................

London Ed seems to be suggesting that we need irreducibly singular concepts (properties, propositional functions) if we are properly to analyze grammatically singular negative existence statements such as

1. Vulcan does not exist.

But why do we need to take 'Vulcan' to express a singular concept or haecceity property?  Why isn't the following an adequate analysis:

1A. The concept Small, intra-Mercurial planet whose existence explains the peculiarities of Mercury's orbit is not instantiated.

Note that the concept picked out by the italicized phrase is general, not singular.  It is general even though only one individual instantiates it if any does.  The fact that different individuals instantiate it at different possible worlds suffices to make the concept general, not irreducibly singular.

Could Scollay Square be a Meinongian Nonexistent Object?

Bill, newly arrived in Boston,  believes falsely that Scollay Square exists and he wants to visit it. Bill asks Kathleen where it is. Kathleen tells him truly that it no longer exists, and Bill believes her. Both use 'Scollay Square' to refer to the same thing, a physical place, one that does not exist. To exist is to exist in reality.  'In reality' means outside the mind; it does not mean in the physical world.  

So both Bill and Kathleen use 'Scollay Square' to refer to a physical place that does not exist. The two are not using (tokens of) 'Scollay Square' to refer to Fregean senses or to any similar abstract/ideal item.* Scollay Square is not such an item.  It is concrete, i.e., causally active/passive.  After all, it was demolished. 

Now it could be that reference is routed through sense as Frege maintained. Perhaps there is no road to Bedeutung except through Sinn. Whether or not that is so, when Bill and Kathleen think and talk about Scollay Square, they are not thinking and talking about an abstract object that mediates reference, whether it be thinking reference or linguistic reference.  They are thinking and talking about a concrete, physical thing that does not exist.

 

We also note that Bill and Kathleen are not thinking or talking about anything immanent to consciousness such as a mental content or a mental act. They are referring to a transcendent physical thing that does not exist.  Scollay Square is not in the head or in the mind; if it were, it would exist! If memory serves, it was the illustrious Kasimir Twardowski who first made this point, leastways, the first in the post-Brentano discussion. 

Therefore, some transcendent physical things do not exist. Copley Square is an example of a transcendent physical thing that does exist.

But you don't buy it do you? Explain why. (I don't buy it either.)

_______________

*Anglosophers use 'abstract'; Eurosophers sometimes use 'ideal.' Same difference (as a redneck student of mine used to say.)

Relations and Nonexistents

 Consider the following two sentences: 

a) Lions are smaller than dragons.
b) Mice are smaller than elephants.

From this datanic base a puzzle emerges. 

1) The data sentences are both true.
2) 'Smaller than' has the same sense in both (a) and (b).
3) In both (a) and (b), 'smaller than' has the same reference: it refers to a dyadic relation.
4) No relation holds or obtains unless all its relata exist.

What we have here is an aporetic tetrad. The four propositions just listed are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. What we have, then, is a philosophical problem in what I call canonical form. Any three  of the above four, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one.  Which limb of the tetrad should we reject?

One might reject (4) while upholding (1), (2), and (3).  Accordingly, some relations connect existents to non-existents.  It is true that lions are smaller than dragons despite it being the case that dragons do not exist.  The sense of 'smaller than' is the same in both (a) and (b).  And 'smaller than' picks out one and the same dyadic relation in both (a) and (b).

The idea here is that there is nothing in the nature of a relation to require that its obtaining entails the existence of all its relata.  Contrast thinking about the Trevi Fountain in Rome and thinking about the Fountain of Youth. Some will say that in both cases the intentional nexus is a genuine relation since there is nothing in the nature of a relation (to be precise: a specific relatedness) to require that all of its relata exist.  It is the same relation, the intentional relation, whether I think of an existing item or think of a non-existent item.

If you don't like this solution you might try rejecting (2) while upholding the remaining limbs: 'smaller than' does not have the same sense in our data sentences. Accordingly, 'are smaller than' in (b) picks out a relation that actually connects mice and elephants.  But in (a), 'are smaller than' does not pick out that relation.  In (a), 'is smaller than' has the sense  'would be smaller than.'  We are thus to understand (a) as having the sense of 'Lions would be smaller than dragons if there were any.'

(2)-rejection arguably falls afoul of Grice's Razor, to wit: one ought not multiply senses beyond necessity. Here is what Grice himself says:

[O]ne should not suppose what a speaker would mean when he used a word in a certain range of cases to count as a special sense of the word, if it should be predictable, independently of any supposition that there is such a sense, that he would use the word (or the sentence containing it) with just that meaning. (Grice, 1989, pp. 47-48, Quoted from Andrea Marchesi, "A radical relationist solution to intentional inexistence," Synthese, 2021.)

Pick your poison.

 

Is Existence Completeness?

Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662:

. . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds.  The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence or reality.  This is entirely in the Meinong-Twardowski tradition.

In other words, existence is complete determinateness or completeness: Necessarily, for any x, x exists if and only if x is complete, i.e., satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).  Now I have long maintained that whatever exists is complete, but I have never been tempted by the thesis that whatever is complete exists.  By my lights, there has to be more to existence than completeness. If I am right, existence cannot be reduced to, or identified with, completeness.

Reader Grigory Aleksin just now reports that the late Dale Jacquette to whom I pay tribute here has a similar view:

Definition of Existence:" For any object O, O exists, has being or is an entity, if and only if O has a maximally consistent property combination."

 

Definition of a Maximally Consistent Property Combination:" A property combination PC for any logically possible object O is maximally consistent if and only if, for any logically possible extraontological property F, either F is in PC or non-F (the complement of F) is in PC, but not both"

 

Thus he holds that:

 

" A combinatorial ontology holds that existence is nothing more or [nor] less than completeness and consistency, or what is also called maximal consistency. The definition, properly understood and applied, provides a unified analysis of the concept of being for all entities, including existent objects, actual states of affairs and the actual world. "

 

"An extraontological property, as the name implies, is a property that by itself does not entail anything about an object’s ontic status, and that is not instantiated unless the relevant property combination is maximally consistent. To maintain that existence does not characterize any object says, in short form, that the object’s property combination is maximally consistent with no predicational gaps only if, for any extraontological property or property complement, the combination includes either the extraontological property or its complement, but not both."

 

The existence-is-completeness doctrine has a interesting consequence which, to my mind, amounts to a reductio ad absurdum:

What Jacquette is telling us is that any maximally consistent combination of properties or states of affairs exists just in virtue of being maximally consistent.  I see two problems with this. 

 

The first problem is that his view entails that every possible world is actual, in which case no possible world is absolutely actual.   Accordingly, every possible world is at best actual-at-itself and not actual, full stop. We end up with a view very much like David Lewis's. Why do I say this? Well, if we consider all the possible combinations of states of affairs, there will not just be one that is maximally consistent and complete and thus existent, but many. 

 

The second problem for Jacquette is that every maximally consistent combination of states of affairs  is necessarily actual.  So not only is every possible world actual at itself, but every such world is necessarily actual at itself.

 

Are these two problems really problems? (Are they bugs or features?)  They are problems for me because I have contrary intuitions. By my lights, there can be only one actual world, and that world is both absolutely actual and contingently actual.  Furthermore, there is no necessity that any world be actual. There might have been no world at all as Jacquette understands 'world': Possibly, no maximally consistent combination of states of affairs exists.  It might have been like this: there is God, who exists of metaphysical necessity, and an infinity of maximally consistent combinations of states of affairs, but none of these combos exists in reality outside the divine mind. 

 

This is equivalent to saying that, while existence entails completeness, completeness does not entail existence. Something must be superadded to a maximally consistent and complete combination of extraontological properties to make it exist.  That something is existence.  The superaddition to a complete essence of existence is what is known in theological terms as creation, at least on one view of divine creation.

 

I say that there is more to existence than completeness; Jacquette denies what I affirm.  Is there any way to decide this rationally?  

Untangling Plato's Beard

I was asked by a commenter what motivates the thin theory of existence.  One motivation is 

. . . the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing. Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor. (Willard Van Orman Quine, "On What There Is" in From a Logical Point of View, Harper Torchbook ed., 1963, pp. 1-2)

As I see it, here is how the paradox arises.

1) 'Pegasus does not exist' is true. Therefore:

2) The sentence in question has meaning. (Only meaningful sentences have a truth value.) 

3) If a sentence has meaning, then so do its (sentential and sub-sentential) parts. (Compositionality of meaning.) Therefore:

4) 'Pegasus' has meaning. Therefore:

5) Something is such that 'Pegasus' refers to it. ('Pegasus' is a proper name, and the meaning of a proper name is its referent, that to which it refers.) Therefore:

6) 'Pegasus' refers to something that exists. (Everything exists; there are no nonexistent objects; one cannot refer to what does not exist for it is not there to be referred to.) Therefore:

7) Pegasus must exist for it to be true that Pegasus does not exist.  Paradox!

None of the first four propositions is plausibly denied. To avoid the conclusion, we must deny either (5) or (6) and the assumptions that generate them. Now Quine is no Meinongian/Wymanian. Quine advocates a Russellian solution which amounts to rejecting (5) by rejecting the assumption that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its reference.  For Russell, ordinary proper names are definite descriptions in disguise. This allows them to have meaning or sense without reference.   Thus 'Pegasus' is elliptical for 'the winged horse of Greek mythology.'  This allows the following contextual paraphrase of 'Pegasus does not exist':

It is not the case that there exists an x such x is the winged horse of Greek mythology

which is free of paradox. What the paraphrase says is that the definite description which gives the sense of 'Pegasus' is not satisfied. Equivalently, it says that the concept winged horse of Greek mythology is not instantiated.   Thus the original sentence, which appeared to be about something that does not exist but which, if it existed, would be an animal, is really about about a description or concept which does exist and which is assuredly not an animal.

It is a brilliant solution, prima vista. It works for negative general existentials as well. 'Unicorns do not exist,' despite its surface grammar, cannot be about unicorns -- after all, there aren't any -- it is about the concept unicorn and predicates of it the property of not being instantiated.  Extending the analysis to affirmative general existentials, we can say that 'Horses exist,' for example, is not about horses -- after all, which horses would it be about? -- it is about the concept horse and predicates of it the property of being instantiated.  

What about singular affirmative existentials such as 'Harry exists'?  Quine maintains that, in a pinch, one can turn a name into a verb and say, with truth, 'Nothing pegasizes' thereby avoiding both Plato's Beard and Meinong's Jungle so as to enjoy, clean-shaven, the desert landscape bathed in lambent light.  So what's to stop us from saying 'Something Harry-sizes'?  (Quite a bit, actually, but I won't go into that in this post, having beaten it to death in numerous other entries. Briefly, there are no haecceity-concepts: there is no such concept Harry-ness that (i) can exist uninstantiated; (ii) if instantiated is instantiated by Harry and Harry alone in the actual world; (iii) is not instantiated by anything distinct from Harry in any possible world.)

Let us now pause to appreciate what the Russellian (or rather 'Fressellian') approach accomplishes in the eyes of its advocates. It untangles Plato's Beard. It avoids Meinong's jungle. It preserves the existence-nonexistence contrast by situating it at the second level, that of descriptions, concepts, propositional functions, properties, as the contrast between satisfaction-nonsatisfaction (for descriptions), instantiation-noninstantiation (for concepts and properties), and having a value-not having a value for propositional functions, or as Russell puts it, being sometimes true or the opposite.

What's more, it diagnoses the failure of certain versions of the ontological argument. Descartes' Meditation Five version has it that God exists because God has all perfections and existence is a perfection. But if Frege and Russell are right, existence is not even a property of God let alone a perfection of him inasmuch as '. . .exist(s)' has no legitimate use as a first-level predicate and can be be properly deployed only as a second-level predicate. (God is an individual.)

Last, but not least, the Fressellian analysis consigns entire libraries of school metaphysics to he flames, the books in which drone on endlessly about Being and Existence and the distinctio realis, and the analogia entis, and ipsum esse subsistens, ad nauseam.  Swept aside are all the hoary and endlessly protracted debates about the relation of essence and existence in individuals: is it a real distinction, and what could that mean? Is it a formal distinction, and what could that mean? Etc. On the Frege-Russell approach there simply is no existence of individuals.

And now you know why the thin theory is called 'thin.' It could also be called 'shallow' in that it eliminates existence as a deep and mysterious topic.  The thin theory disposes of existence as a metaphysical topic, reducing it to a merely logical topic.  As Quine famously says in an essay other than the one cited above, "Existence is what existential quantification expresses."  Thus 'Cats exist' says no more and no less than 'For some x, x is a cat.'  You will note that the analysans makes no mention of existence. It features only the word 'cat' and some logical machinery. Existence drops out as a metaphysical topic.

Of course, I don't accept the thin theory; but as you can see, I appreciate what motivates it in the minds of its adherents.

A Reader Asks about Existence and Instantiation

My responses are in blue.

Hello, Dr. Vallicella. I am a reader of your blog. I just read your article "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics (eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75 , and I thought it was fantastic. I will have to read it again at some point. There were some parts in it that I found very interesting, and I was hoping I could ask you about. I want to focus on what you said in section 6.6, page 57. You write: 

 

"It is clear that “Unicorns do not exist” cannot be about unicorns: There are none. So it is reasonably analysed in terms of “ The concept unicorn is not instantiated”. But then the concept must exist, and its existence cannot be its being instantiated." 

 

The question I wanted to ask you was specifically about the final part, "But then the concept must exist, and its existence cannot be its being instantiated". I will try to keep the questions as brief as possible, 

 

The thin theorist might not identify the existence of the concept of a unicorn with its being instantiated, but with the concept of the concept of the unicorn being instantiated, and so on . . .

 

1) If it were possible that there be an infinite number of concepts, would there be any problem with this view?

 

BV:  An infinite regress would arise.

 

2) Clearly, we have a regress here, but is it vicious?

 

BV: Yes, because there would be no explanation of  the existence of the first concept in the infinite series. You might reply by saying that the series is actually, as opposed to potentially, infinite.  If so, then every concept in the series would have an explanation of its existence.  To which my response would be:   what explains the existence of the entire actually infinite series of concepts?

 

(An analogous situation. Suppose the universe is a beginningless actual infinity of continuum-many states with each state caused by earlier ones. If so, every state would have a causal explanation. But if every state of the universe has a causal explanation, then one might plausibly suppose that the universe has a causal explanation, one that is internal to it. Some people have maintained this with an eye toward ruling out the need for a transcendent explainer such as God. "There is no need for God because a universe with an actually infinite past has the resources to explain itself."  My objection would be that this account leaves us with no explanation of why the entire series of states exists in the first place.  Given that the entire series is modally contingent, and thus possibly such as not to exist at all, then any explanation of it, assuming that there is an explanation of it, could only be external or transcendent. Now back to the main thread.)

 

One might also question whether the concept regress could even get started. You want to say that the concept unicorn exists in virtue of its being an instance of the concept concept unicorn. But these two concepts have exactly the same content. How then do they differ? The concept unicorn is an instance of the concept concept, but I fail to see any difference between the concept unicorn and the concept concept unicorn.

 

3) The overall worry is that if we define x's existence in terms of instantiation, and then ask 'what are "x's"', we say things in existence, and, this is circular, but, since we are simply dealing with the analysis of terms, aren't we only dealing with semantic circularity? I am not sure that there is any problem with this sort of circularity (if there is a problem, it would be with the informativeness with the analysis rather than the accuracy).

 

BV: But we are not merely dealing with the analysis of terms; we are seeking to understand what it is for an individual to exist, given that the existence of a thing is extra-linguistic.   Let's keep in mind what the question is.  The question is whether an adequate theory of existence could treat '. . . exist(s)' as a second-level or second-order predicate only, that is, a predicate of concepts, properties, propositional functions,  descriptions (definite or indefinite), or cognate items. That is the Frege-Russell theory that I have in my sights in the portion of text to which my reader refers.

 

Granted, it is  true that Fs exist iff the concept F is instantiated.  For example, it is  true that cats exist iff the concept cat is instantiated. (This assumes that there is the concept cat, which is certainly true in our world if not in all possible worlds: it depends on what we take concepts to be.) But the right-hand-side (RHS) of the biconditional merely specifies a truth-condition on the semantic plane: it does not take us beyond or beneath that plane to the plane of extra-linguistic reality.  The truth of the LHS requires an ontological ground, a truth-maker, not a truth-condition. For consider: if the concept cat is instantiated, then, since it is a first-order concept, and relational as opposed to monadic, it is instantiated by one or more individuals. Individuals by definition are impredicable and uninstantiable. My cat Max Black, for example, is categorially unfit to have any instances, and you can't predicate him of anything. The little rascal is unrepeatable and impredicable.

 

Now either the instantiating individuals exist or they do not. If they do not, then the truth of the biconditional above is not preserved. But if they do exist, then the sense in which the instances exist is toto caelo different from the sense specified by 'is instantiated.' To repeat, by definition, individuals cannot be instantiated; therefore, the existence of an individual --call it singular existence --  cannot be explicated in terms of instantiation.

 

The instantiation account of existence either changes the subject from singular existence to general existence (instantiation) or else it moves in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter.  We want to know what it is for individuals to exist, and we are told that for individuals to exist is for first-level concepts to be instantiated; but for these concepts to be instantiated, their instances must exist singularly and thus in a sense that cannot be explicated in terms of instantiation. To put it another way: the account presupposes what it is trying to get rid of. It wants to reduce singular existence to general existence, thereby eliminating singular existence, but it ends up presupposing singular existence. If you tell me that the instances neither exist nor do not exist and that this contrast first arises at the level of concepts , then I will point out that you are thereby committed to Meinongian objects, to pure Sosein without Dasein.

 

The circularity I allege is the circularity of ontological/metaphysical explanation.  Is 'Tom exists' true because Tom exists, or does Tom exist because 'Tom exists' is true?  If this question makes sense to you and you respond by opting for  the former, then you understand metaphysical explanation.  It is an explanation that is neither empirical nor narrowly logical. Somewhat murky it might be, but nonetheless indispensable for metaphysics.  Similarly with the question: does Tom exist because some concept C is instantiated, or is C instantiated because Tom exists? The question makes sense and the answer is the latter.

 

I want to note that these are questions someone asked me about this view, and I wasn't sure how to respond, even though I ultimately do agree with your analysis of the thin theory. For the third problem, I would have said that that sort of response would merely ignore the fact that the question 'what is existence?' has ontological consequences, and is not merely a question of semantics. [Right!] If that is all we are concerned with (semantics), then we are concerned with something different than what most classical philosophers are concerned with when they are talking about the question 'what is existence?', which is the ontological aspect of that question, and as such, the circularity issue is a real problem. [You got it!]

 

BV: The problem with Frege, Russell, Quine, van Inwagen, and the rest of the 'thin  crew' is that they try to reduce existence to a merely logical topic. An opposite or at least different mistake is made by the phenomenologists who (most of them, not all of them) try to reduce existence to a phenomenological topic.  Heidegger, near the beginning of Sein und Zeit, opines that "Ontology is only possible as phenomenology." 

 

So I got me a two-front war on my hands: against the nuts-and-bolts analysts to the West and against the febrile phenomenologists to the East.

 

Nominalism, Existence, and Subsistence

Here are five versions of nominalism by my current count:

Mad-Dog Nominalism: No word has an extra-linguistic referent, not even proper names such as 'Peter' and 'Paul.' 

Extreme Nominalism: The only words that have existing referents are proper names like 'Peter' and Paul'; nothing in reality corresponds to such predicates as 'blond.' And a fortiori nothing corresponds to copulae and logically connective words such as 'and' and 'or.'

Nominalism Proper: Particulars (unrepeatables) alone exist: there are no universals (repeatables). This view allows that something in reality corresponds to predicates such as 'blond' as in 'Peter is blond.' It is just that what this predicate denotes is not a universal but a particular, a trope say, or an Aristotelian accident. What I am calling nominalism proper also allows for abstract particulars where an item is abstract just in case it is non-spatio-temporal and causally inert. Mathematical sets, for example are abstract particulars. The set: {x: x is a prime number and x is less than 1o} is abstract because it has no spatiotemporal location and is causally inert. It is particular because it is unrepeatable which is equivalent to saying that it is not possibly such as to be instantiated. Sets have members -- the null set aside -- but no instances. (Quiz for the reader: tell me the cardinality of the set just mentioned.)

Reistic Nominalism: Attach the codicil 'There are no abstract items' to nominalism proper and the result is reistic nominalism.  On this view only particulars exist, and all particulars are concrete (non-abstract).  Franz Brentano is his later years was a reist.  See the SEP entry, Reism.

Methodological Nominalism: This is the view that we ought never assume that for each word there is a corresponding entity.

I hope no one is crazy enough to be a mad-dog nominalist, and that everyone is sane enough to be a methodological nominalist. The three middle positions, however, are subject to reasonable controversy. They are not obviously false and they are not obviously true. What I am calling extreme nominalism has little to recommend it, but I think nominalism proper is quite a reasonable position.  As it seems to me, there has to be something extra-linguistic (and extra-mental) corresponding to the predicate in 'Peter is blond,' but it is not obvious that it must be a universal.  

Thomas Beale sent me to a blog post of his that begins as follows:

Nominalism is a philosophical doctrine usually understood to entail a rejection of universals, in favour of the belief that only the concrete exists. Universals are understood as instantiable entities, i.e. something like types. Another flavour of nominalism involves rejection of abstracta, such as mathematical entities, propositions, fictional entities (including possible worlds). 

I personally think that most nominalist arguments are straightforwardly wrong, but not for the usual reasons that universals and/or abstracta are said by realists to exist, but for the opposite reason: types and abstracta are just there, even if they don’t ‘exist’, in the sense of being spatio-temporally concretised. The real problem is that we misuse the word exists at least half the time in philosophy. The way we should talk is to say things like: there are universals . . . .

So that’s why nominalists are wrong. There are universals, but they don’t exist. 

First of all, it is no misuse of 'exist/exists' to use these expressions interchangeably with 'is/are.' It is standard English to use them interchangeably. Examples: I am; I exist. God is; God exists. Island volcanoes exist; there are island volcanoes. Unicorns do not exist; unicorns are not; there exist no unicorns; there are no unicorns.  Scollay Square once existed; Scollay Square once was.  Socrates would never have come to be had his parents never met; Socrates would never have come to exist had his parents never met. And so on.

Nevertheless, we are not the slaves of ordinary language and one is free to distinguish between existence and being as Bertrand Russell did in Principles of Mathematics. 

Now if existence is the mode of being enjoyed by all and only spatiotemporal items, then abstracta and transcendent universals do not exist. (A transcendent universal is one that needn't be instantiated to be. An immanent universal is one that cannot be unless it is instantiated.) If transcendent universals are, but do not exist, then they enjoy the mode of being called subsistence. This seems to be what Mr Beale is telling us. 

Here is an interesting question. Suppose with David Armstrong that universals are immanent --ones-in-many, not ones-over many -- and that first-order immanent universals are constituents of thick spatio-temporal particulars. Would not these universals be "spatio-temporally concretised" in Beale's words?  Suppose universal U is a constituent of a, b, and c -- concrete existing spatiotemporal particulars -- and is wholly present in each without prejudice to its unity as a universal. Would U then not be "spatio-temporally concretised" and therefore existent?

One more question. If there were a good argument for either nominalism proper and/or reistic nominalism, would  that not also be a good argument against universals and abstracta that are but do not exist?  He who fights shy of multiplying entities beyond necessity does not care whether the entities exist or subsist.

Finally, aren't there good objections to the notion that there are modes of being?

Notes on Nicholas Rescher, "Nonexistents Then and Now"

0. This entry is relevant to my ongoing dialog with Dr. Novak about reference to the nonexistent. I hope he has the time and the stamina to continue the discussion. I have no doubt that he has the 'chops.' I thank him for the stimulation. We philosophize best with friends, as Aristotle says somewhere. But to the Peripatetic is also attributed the thought that amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas. 

 

 

The Rescher text under scrutiny is from a chapter in his Scholastic Meditations, Catholic UP, 2005, 126-148.

1. One objection I have is that Rescher tends to conflate the epistemological with the ontological. A careful reading of the following passage shows the conflation at work.  I have added comments in brackets in blue. Bolding added, italics in original.  

To begin, note that a merely possible world is never given. It is not something we can possibly encounter in experience. The only world that confronts us in the actual course of things is the real world, this actual world of ours -- the only world to which we gain entry effortlessly, totally free of charge. [This is practically a tautology.  All Rescher is saying is that the only world we can actually experience is the actual world, merely possible worlds being, by definition, not actual.]  To move from it, we must always do something, namely, make a hypothesis -- assumption, supposition, postulation, or the like. The route of hypotheses affords the only cognitive access to the realm of nonexistent possibility. [Rescher's wording suggests that there is a realm of nonexistent possibility and that we can gain cognitive access to it.]  For unlike the real and actual world, possible worlds never come along of themselves and become accessible to us without our actually doing something, namely, making an assumption or supposition or such-like. Any possible world with which we can possibly deal will have to be an object of our contrivance -- of our making by means of some supposition or assumption. [In this last sentence Rescher clearly slides from an epistemological claim, one about how we come to know the denizens of the realm of nonexistent possibility, to an ontological claim about what merely possible worlds and their denizens ARE, namely, objects of our contrivance.](131)

Rescher wants to say about  the merely possible what he says about the purely fictional, namely, that pure ficta are objects of our contrivance.  But this too, it seems to me, is an illicit conflation.  The purely fictional is barred from actuality by its very status as purely fictional: Sherlock Holmes cannot be actualized.  What cannot be actualized is not possible; it is impossible. Sherlock Holmes is an impossible item.  He is impossible because he is incomplete. Only the complete (completely determinate) is actualizable. Sherlock is incomplete because he is the creation of  a finite fiction writer: Sherlock has all and only the properties ascribed to him by Conan Doyle. Not even divine power could bring about the actualization of the Sherlock of the Conan Doyle stories.   What God could do is bring about the actualization of various individuals with all or some of Sherlock's properties. None of those individuals, however, would be Sherlock. Each of them would differ  property-wise from Sherlock.

2. The conflation of the merely possible with the purely fictional is connected with another mistake Rescher makes.  Describing the "medieval mainstream," (129) Rescher lumps mere possibilia and pure ficta together as entia rationis.  For this mistake, Daniel Novotny takes him to task, explaining that "Suarez and most other Baroque scholastics considered merely possible beings to be real, and hence they were not classified as beings of reason." (Ens Rationis from Suarez to Caramuel, Fordham UP, 2013, p. 27)   Entia rationis, beings of reason, are necessarily mind-dependent impossible objects.  Mere possibilia are not, therefore, entia rationis.

3. As I understand it, the problem of the merely possible is something like this.  Merely possible individuals and states of affairs are not nothing, nor are they fictional.  And of course their possibility is not merely epistemic, or parasitic upon our ignorance.  Merely possible individuals and states of affairs have some sort of mind-independent reality.  But how the devil can we make sense of this mind-independent reality given that the merely possible, by definition, is not actual?  Suppose we cast the puzzle in the mold of an aporetic triad:

a. The merely possible is not actual.

b. The merely possible is real (independently of finite minds).

c.  Whatever is  real is actual.

Clearly, the members of this trio cannot all be true.  Any two of them, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of the remaining one.  For example, the conjunction of the last two propositions entails the negation of the first.

What are the possible solutions given that the triad is  genuinely logically inconsistent and given that the triad is soluble?  I count exactly five possible solutions.

S1.  Eliminativism.  The limbs are individually undeniable but jointly inconsistent, which is to say: there are no mere possibilia.  One could be an error theorist about mere possibilia.  On this solution we deny the common presupposition of (a) and (b), namely, that there are merely possible individuals and states of affairs. 

S2.  Conceptualism.  Deny (b) while accepting the other two limbs.  There are mere possibilia, but what they are are conceptual constructions by finite minds. This is essentially Rescher's view.  See his A Theory of Possibility: A Constructivistic and Conceptualistic Theory of Possible Individuals and Possible Worlds (Basil Blackwell, 1975). He could be described as an artifactualist about possibilities: "A possible individual is an intellectual artifact: the product of a projective 'construction' . . . ." (p. 61)

S3.  Actualism/Ersatzism.  Deny (a) while accepting the other two limbs.  One looks for substitute entities -- actual entities -- to go proxy for the mere possibles.  Thus, on one approach, the merely possible state of affairs  of there being a unicorn is identified with an actual abstract entity, the property of being a unicorn.  For the possibility to be actual is for the the property to be instantiated. 

On this version of actualism, the mind-independent reality of the merely possible is identified with the mind-independent reality of certain actual abstract items. In this way one avoids both eliminativism and constructivism.

S4. Extreme Modal Realism.  Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs.  David Lewis.  There is a plurality of possible worlds conceived of as maximal merelogical sums of concreta.  The worlds and their inhabitants are all equally real.  But no world is absolutely actual.  Each is merely actual at itself.   In this world, I am a philosopher. On extreme modal realism, the possibility of my being an electrical engineer instead is understood as various counterparts of me being electrical engineers in various possible worlds.

S5. Theologism.  Deny (c) while accepting the other two limbs.  We bring God into the picture to secure the reality of the possibles instead of a plurality of equally real worlds.   Consider the possibility of there being unicorns.  This is a mere possibility since it is not actual.  But the possibility is not nothing: it is a definite possibility, a real possibility that does not depend for its reality on finite minds.  There aren't any unicorns, but there really could have been some, and the fact of this mere possibility has nothing to do with what we do or think or say.  The content of the possibility subsists as an object of the divine intellect, and its actualizability is grounded in God's power.  We could perhaps say that possibilia enjoy esse intentionale in or before the divine intellect, but lack esse reale unless the divine will actualizes them. 

4.  Part of Rescher's support for his constructivism/conceptualism/artifactualism is his attack on the problem of transworld identity.  For Rescher,  "the issue of transworld identity actually poses no real problems -- a resolution is automatically available."   Rescher's argument is hard to locate due to his bloated, meandering, verbose style of writing.  Rescher rarely says anything in a direct and pithy way if he can  pad it out with circumlocutions and high-falutin' phraseology.  (I confess to sometimes being guilty of this myself.)

But basically such argument as I can discern seems to involve equivocation on such terms as 'individuation' and 'identity' as between epistemological and ontological senses.  He gives essentially the following argument on p. 141.  This is my reconstruction and is free of equivocation.

A. All genuine individuals are complete.

B.  All merely possible individuals are complete only if completely describable by us.

C.  No merely possible individuals are completely describable by us.

Therefore

D. No merely possible individuals are genuine individuals.

But why should we accept (B)? Why can't there be nonexistent individuals that are complete?  Rescher just assumes that the properties of such individuals must be supplied by us.  But that is to beg the question against those who believe in the reality of the merely possible.  He just assumes the truth of artifactualism about the merely possible.  Consider the following sentences

d. Bill Clinton is married to Hillary Rodham.

e. Bill Clinton remained single.

f. Bill Clinton  married someone distinct from Hillary Rodham.

Only the first sentence is true, but, I want to say, the other two are possibly true: they pick out merely possible states of affairs.  There are three possible worlds involved: the actual world and two merely possible worlds.  Now does 'Bill Clinton' pick out the same individual in each of these three worlds?  I am inclined to say yes, despite the fact that we cannot completely describe the world in which our boy remains single or the world in which he marries someone other than Hillary.  But Rescher will have none of this because his conceptualism/constructivism/ artifactualism bars him from holding that actual individuals in merely possible worlds or merely possible individuals have properties other that those we hypothesize them as having.  So, given the finitude of our hypothesizing, actual individuals in merely possible worlds, or merely possible individuals, can only be incomplete items, multiply realizable schemata, and thus not genuine individuals.  But then the possible is assimilated to the fictional.

5, How solve the triad?  Novak will put God to work and adopt something along the lines of (S5).  I am inclined to say that the problem, while genuine, is insoluble, and that the aporetic triad is a genuine aporia.

Existence as Completeness? Gilson on Scotus, Thomas, and the Real Distinction

I composed this entry with Lukáš Novák in mind. I hope to secure his comments.

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Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662:

. . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds.  The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence or reality.  This is entirely in the Meinong-Twardowski tradition.

In other words, existence is complete determinateness or completeness: Necessarily, for any x, x exists if and only if x is complete, i.e., satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).  Now I have long maintained that whatever exists is complete, but I have never been tempted by the thesis that whatever is complete exists.  My intuitions on this matter are Thomistic rather than Scotistic.

According to Etienne Gilson, Duns Scotus held that actually to exist in reality = to be complete:

. . . actual existence appears only when an essence is, so to speak, bedecked with the complete series of its determinations. (Being and Some Philosophers, Pontifical Institute, Toronto, 1952, 2nd ed. , 89)

Actual existence thus appears as inseparable from the essence when essence is taken in its complete determination. (88)

An actually existing essence is, meaning by "is" that it exists, as soon as it is fully constituted by its genus, its species, its own individual "thisness," as well as all the accidents which go to make up its being. (86)

It follows that an actually existing thing is not the result of the superaddition of existence to a complete essence, but is just an essence in its completeness. This implies that there is no distinctio realis. For if an actually existing individual essence exists in virtue of being completely determinate, then there cannot be any distinction in reality between that complete essence and its existence. If Socrates is a wholly determinate essence, then, on the Scotist view as glossed by Gilson, there is no need for anything more to make him exist: nothing needs to be added ab extra.

What we have here are two very different theories of existence.  For the Scotist, existence belong in the order of essence as the maximal determinateness of essence.  For the Thomist, existence does not belong in the order of essence but is situated 'perpendicular' to it. Is there any way rationally to decide between these views? Could there be complete nonexistent objects? If yes, then the Scotist view would stand refuted.  If no, then the Thomist view would stand refuted.

Well, why can't there be complete nonexistent objects?  Imagine the God of Leibniz, before the creation, contemplating an infinity of possible worlds, each of them determinate down to the last detail.  None of them exists or is actual.  But each of them is complete.  One of them God calls 'Charley.'  God says, Fiat Charley! And Charley exists.  It is exactly the same world which 'before' was merely possible, but 'now'  is actual.  The difference is not one of essence, but one of existence.

So, while existence entails completeness, why should completeness entail existence?  

(Other questions arise at this point which are off-topic, for example, why Charley over Barley?  Why Charley over any other world?  Must God have a reason?  And what would it be?  Would it be because Charley is the best of all possible worlds?  Is there such a things as the BEST of all possible worlds?  Why some world rather than no world?  And so on. But these questions are off-topic.  Focus like a laser on the question about the 'nature' of existence.) 

The theological imagery is supposed to help you understand the ontological point.  But we needn't bring God into it. It would also not be to the point to protest that God creates out of nothing, not out of mere possibles.  My concern here is with the nature of existence, not with the nature of  God or of divine creation. All I need for my argument is the possibility that there be maximally determinate individual essences that do not exist.  If there are, then existence is not completeness.  But one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. Can either side refute the other?

In the end the dispute may come down to a profound and irresolvable difference in intuitions. 

What say you, Dr. Novak?

God and Existence: How Related?

A reader asks:

You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were?

This is an entirely reasonable question. I will try to answer it.

 

First of all, when we say that God is identical to his existence, we mean that there is no real distinction in God between essence (nature) and existence in the way in which there is a real distinction in Socrates (our representative creature) between essence (nature) and existence.  It is the real distinction in Socrates that grounds his metaphysical contingency, while it is the lack of such a distinction in God that grounds his metaphysical necessity.

 

This is to say that God, unlike creatures, is ontologically simple.  In a slogan of St Augustine, God is what he has.  Thus he has his existence by being his existence.  In this one case, the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication coalesce. Why must God be simple?  Because he is the absolute reality.  If your god is not the absolute reality, then your god is not God but an idol.  The absolute cannot depend on anything else for its nature or existence on pain of ceasing to be the absolute.  It must possess aseity, from-itself-ness. 

 

Now Existence is in some way common to everything that exists, though it is not common in the manner of a property or a concept.  Thus God and Socrates have Existence in common.  If God is not identical to Existence, then he is like Socrates and must depend on Existence as something other than himself to exist.  But this violates the divine aseity.

 

Therefore, God is not only identical to his existence, he is identical to Existence itself.

 

Objection:  "If God is identical to Existence, then God alone exists, which flies in the face of the evident fact that there is a plurality of non-divine existents."

 

Reply:   The objection succeeds only if there are no different ways of existing.  But if God exists-underivatively and creatures exist-derivatively, then God's identity with Existence does not entail that God alone exists; it entails that God alone exists-underivatively.

 

The picture is this.  Existence is that which makes derivative existents exist.  If Existence did not itself exist, then nothing would exist.  So Existence itself exists.  It is identical to God.  God is the unsourced Source of everything distinct from God.  God, as Existence itself, is the Paradigm Existent.  God is at once both Existence and the prime case of Existence.

 

In this respect, God is like a Platonic Form in which all else participates.  (It is worth recalling in this connection that Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, the form of all forms.)  God is self-existent Existence; creatures are not self-existent, but derive their existence from self-existent Existence.

 

Objection:  "This scheme issues in something like the dreaded Third Man Regress.  If Socrates and Plato both exist by participating in Existence, which exists, then there are three things that exist, Socrates, Plato, and Existence, each of which exists by participation.  If so, there must be a second Existence, Existence-2 that Socrates, Plato and Existence-1 participate in.  But then an infinite regress is up and running, one that is, moreover, vicious."

 

Response:  The Third Man Regress is easily blocked by distinguishing the way Existence exists and the way derivative existents exist.  Socrates exists by participating in Existence; Existence exists, not by participation, but by being (identical to) Existence.

 

There is exactly one case in which existence = self-identity.  This is the case of the Paradigm Existent, which is Existence itself, which is God.  If God is God, then God exists. (Bonaventura) In every other case, existence is not self-identity.  No doubt Socrates is self-identical; but his self-identity is not the ground of his existence.

A Contingent Self-Existent?

Tom asks,

Does it make sense to say that something could be contingently self-existent? I'm assuming that 'being self-existent' is not the same thing as 'existing necessarily', for then my question wouldn't make sense. Maybe I'm wrong to make this distinction. But if I'm not, can it be a contingent matter that x exists and has self-existence?

The answer depends on what 'self-existent' is taken to mean.  If it doesn't mean necessarily existent, then the only other possibility that comes to mind is self-causing.  Accordingly, if x is self-existent, then x is not caused by another to exist, but causes itself to exist. This, however, is inconceivable.  For a thing cannot do any causing unless it already (logically speaking) exists.   Therefore, nothing can cause its own existence.  There is no 'existential bootstrapping.' Nothing can haul its (nonexistent) self out of the dreck of nonexistence by its own (nonexistent) bootstraps.

My answer, then, is that nothing is contingently self-existent. 

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ADDENDUM (1/11)

After writing the above, I recalled that my late friend Quentin Smith had argued that the universe caused itself to exist, and that I responded in the pages of the British journal Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 604-612.

ABSTRACT: This article responds to Quentin Smith's, "The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist," Philosophy 74 (1999), 579-586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory. The second point is that the refutation of Smith's  argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two 'causal loop'  arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).

My article is here.

ABSTRACT: This article responds to Quentin Smith's, "The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist," Philosophy 74 (1999), 579-586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory. The second point is that the refutation of Smith's  argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two 'causal loop'  arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).

My article is here.

The Aporetics of Existence: Do Existing Things Have Existence?

A reader inquires,

I have been wondering about whether existing things have existence. This seems obvious to me, but Bradley's regress makes me think twice. For if existing things have existence, then given that existence exists, existence also has existence. And since this latter existence also exists, it also has existence. And so on.

 

What do you make of this problem?

There is a problem here, but since Bradley's regress concerns relations, we can leave Mr. Bradley out of it.  And there is a problem even if there is no vicious infinite regress.  (Not every infinite regress is vicious; some are, if not virtuous, at least benign.) Here is the problem as I see it.  We start with a datum and we end with a paradox.

 

1) This table in front of me exists. 

 

2) The table exists, but it might not have, which is to say that it exists contingently.   There is no metaphysical necessity that it exist.

 

3) What accounts for the contingency of the thing's existence?  Equivalently, what accounts for the real possibility of the thing's nonexistence? (A real possibility is one that is not epistemic or factitious.)

 

4) A classical answer is in terms of a distinction between the thing and its existence/existing.  This distinction is not merely excogitated by us but corresponds to a difference in reality; it is therefore called a real distinction.  'Real' is from res, thing. A contingent being, then, is one in which essence and existence are really distinct in the sense that, in reality or extra-mentally, the existence/existing of the being is no part of what the thing is.  A non-contingent being is one that is either impossible or necessary, and a necessary being is one whose existence is part of what the thing is.  God is the prime example of a necessary being. In God essence and existence are one, which is to say: in God, there is no real distinction between essence and existence.

 

5) Pace Giles of Rome, however, the real distinction between a thing and its existence is not a distinction between two things metaphysically capable of independent existence.  A thing metaphysically  capable of independent existence is by definition a substance.  Clearly, my table is not a collection of two substances, one its essence, the other its existence.  Hence the distinction between a thing and its existence is not at all like the distinction between my eye glasses and my head or that between my table and the chair in front of it. They are really distinct and separable. The table and its existence are really distinct but inseparable. The latter distinction is more like the distinction between the concavity and convexity of a lens.  It is a real distinction, but neither term of the distinction can exist without the other. 

 

Therefore

 

6) If the individual essence of the table (its whaness or quiddity in the broad sense) is the concrete table  taken in abstraction from its existence, then,  pace Avicenna and his latter-day colleague Alexius von Meinong,  this essence does not itself exist.  The same holds for the existence of the table: it does not itself exist. What exists is the concrete table which is composed of essence and existence as mutually dependent ontological factors.  If you think otherwise, and think of essence and existence as substances in their own right, then you have committed the fallacy of hypostatization or reification. (The only difference is that between Greek and Latin.) 

 

7) If the existence of the table does not itself exist, is the existence of the table nothing at all?   The existence of a thing is that in virtue of which it exists. If you say that the existence of a thing is nothing at all, then either (i) the table does not exist, contrary to fact, or (ii) the existence of the table is (identically) the table, in which case we have no account of the contingency of the thing. Argument for (i): the existence of my table is that in virtue of which my table exists; ergo, if the existence of my table is nothing at all, then my table is nothing at all and does not exist, which is contrary to our datanic starting point.  Argument for (ii):  For the table to be contingent, it must be really distinct from its existence: if its essence were identical to its existence it would be a necessary being. (God is a necessary being precisely because there is no distinction in him between essence and existence. Of course, we cannot think about God without distinguishing God's essence or nature and God's existence;  but this distinction finds no purchase in God: it is a necessary makeshift in the sense that without it we cannot think of God.)  

 

8) The paradox is now upon us. With respect to contingent beings, we seem forced to say that the existence of such a being both is (exists) and is not (does not exist).  Both limbs of this aporetic dyad are reasonably asserted.  But of course a contradiction cannot be true. Of course. That is why the dyad is an aporia, an impasse that the discursive intellect cannot negotiate. No way, man!

 

Limb One. To explain the contingency of the table we have to distinguish the (individual) essence of the concrete table from its existence.  It would avail nothing to bring in talk of possible worlds and say that a contingent being is one that exists in some but not all possible worlds. For 'possible worlds' are merely a representational device to render graphic modal relationships.  (I cannot explain this any further now.  See my Modality category.) So if we want to explain the contingency of concrete particulars and not leave it unexplained, then it seems we must distinguish between the thing (or the essence of the thing) and the thing's existence.  Therefore, the thing's existence/existing cannot be nothing.  It must exist.

 

Limb Two. There are no bare existents: necessarily, whatever exists has a nature or at least some quidditative properties.  So if the existence of my table itself exists, then it has a nature. The nature it would have, presumably would be that of a table, not that of a turnip or a valve-lifter.  But then we have two tables, which is absurd.  The pressure is on to say that the existing of the thing is nothing at all.

 

The paradox is that both halves of the contradiction are rationally defensible.

 

Is there a solution?

 

If there is a solution, I'd like to know what it is.  Please don't say that the existence of the table is one of its properties, a property that does not exist on its own, and is therefore not a substance, but only in the table in the manner of an accident or in the manner of an immanent universal.  If S is a substance, and A is an accident of S, then  A cannot be the existence of S for the simple reason that S must already (logically speaking) exist if it is to support any accident, including the putative accident of existence. Similarly if you try to assay existence as an immanent first-level universal.   If a property is defined as an instantiable entity, then existence cannot be understood as a property of existing particulars. This is because the particular must already exist to be in a position to instantiate any properties including the putative property of existence.  (Bear in mind what I said above about Avicenna and Meinong.)  Existence is not a first-level property.  I have given just one argument among several.

 

And please don't say that existence is a property of properties, the property of being instantiated.   This is the Frege-Russell theory which I have subjected to thorough critique many times on this blog and in print.  Here is one very simple argument. If the existence of a concrete particular a is some property's being instantiated, the only property that could fill the bill is the haecceity property a-ness. But there are no haecceity properties.  Ergo, etc.

 

We are stuck with our paradox: The existence/existing of an existing thing neither is (exists) nor is not (does not exist).

 

A bowl of menudo and a Corona if you can solve it.   

Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia

On deism, God starts the universe existing, but then he takes it easy, allowing it to exist on its own in virtue of its 'existential inertia.' The latter is an analog of inertia in physics. Newton's First Law states that a body at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion continues in its state of rest or motion unless acted upon by an external force. Analogously, what could be called the First Law of Deistic Metaphysics states that an existing thing continues to exist on its own without external assistance unless acted upon by an external annihilatory force.  This is but a rough and preliminary formulation of the thesis of existential inertia.  Continuing to exist is the 'default.'  Suppose I bring a primitive table into existence by placing a board on a stump.  The thought behind 'existential inertia' is that the compound object that just came to be does not need something to keep it from blinking out of existence a nanosecond, microsecond, millisecond . . . later.

On classical theism, by contrast with deism, God is no mere cosmic starter-upper: creatures need God not only to begin to exist but to continue existing moment by moment.  A defense of classical theism against deism must therefore include a rejection of existential inertia.

Steven Nemes offers a rejection of existential inertia in his article Deism, Classical Theism, and Existential Inertia. He solicits my comments. I am happy to oblige.

He defines the phrase as follows:

Let’s say that the existence of a thing is “inertial” if and only if it continues to exist over time, in the absence of annihilating factors, without the assistance of anything outside of it.

He gives the example of a cat which, "once in existence, continues to exist over time, so long as nothing intervenes to destroy it, without anything outside of the cat helping it or sustaining it in existence." But surely the cat cannot continue to exist without air, water, food, a tolerable range of temperatures, and so on, factors clearly external to the cat.   Note also that Nemes' definition presupposes that only temporal items are existentially inertial which is not obvious: on a classically theistic scheme even so-called 'abstract objects' are going to have to be existentially inertial.  But I won't worry this second point in this entry.

Here is a better way to convey the notion of existential inertia. Suppose a deistic god creates exactly one iron sphere and nothing else.  In this world there is nothing to cause the sphere to rust or otherwise corrode away into nonexistence.  Nor does it, like a living organism, require anything external to it to continue to exist.  It doesn't need oxygen or water like Nemes' cat. And it has no internal mechanism to self-destruct.  The sphere exists inertially iff its 'default setting' is continued existence which is to say: it has no intrinsic tendency to cease to exist. 

The sphere is of course a contingent being. Hence there is no necessity that it continue to exist.  But while there is no necessity that it continue to exist, it will continue to exist absent some external annihilatory force. The deistic god could zap it out of existence, but if he doesn't, it will continue to exist on its own 'steam.'  He needn't do anything to keep it in existence, and of course he can't if he is truly deistic.

And the same goes for the cat, despite the cat's need for materials in its environment such as oxygen and food.  It too will continue to exist if those things are supplied without the need for a special metaphysical factor to keep it from sliding into nonbeing.  The critter's natural default is to existence.

Nemes's Argument against Existential Inertia

1) The real existence of the cat does not show itself as one of its properties.

2) "The real existence of the cat is thus not a part of that total complex of individuated properties which make up the particular cat which we experience. "

3) "The unexperienceable real existence of the experienceable cat must therefore be something that is somehow “outside” of the cat, and yet “pointed at it” in such a way that the cat exists."

4) "This is easy to understand if we say that the existence of the cat consists in its standing on the receiving end of an existence-endowing relation to “something else.” ". . . a “something else” that is not itself an individual thing with properties but rather pure existence itself. And this “pure existence itself,” according to classical theists, is God."

(1) is true. (2) appears merely to unpack (explicate) (1); if so, it too is true.  The transition to (3), however, is a non sequitur. The real existence of the cat might be hidden within it or an empirically inaccessible feature of it.  Absent further premises, one cannot conclude that the real existence is 'outside' the cat.

Of course, I am not endorsing existential inertia; I am merely pointing out that the above argument, as it stands, is invalid. Perhaps with further work it can be made valid. 

Knowledge of Existence: Is Existence Hidden?

1) I see a tree, a palo verde.  Conditions are optimal for veridical perception.  I see that the tree is green, blooming, swaying slightly in the breeze. The tree is given to my perceptual acts as having these and other properties.  Now while I do not doubt for a second the existence of the tree, let alone deny its existence, the tree is not given as existing.  It is given as green, as blooming, etc., but not as existing. I see the green of the tree, but I don't see the existence of the tree.  If existence is a property of the tree, it is not an observable property thereof.  Whatever existence is, it is not phenomenologically accessible or empirically detectable. And yet the tree exists. We might be tempted to reason as follows:

a) The tree is not exhausted by its quiddity: it is not a mere what, but an existing what.
b) The existing/existence does not appear: only quidditative properties appear.

Therefore

c) The existing/existence of the tree is hidden.

2) Should we conclude that the existing of things is mysterious or hidden, an occult depth dimension beyond our phenomenological ken? P. Butchvarov and others would answer in the negative. And presumably anyone phenomenologically inclined would have to agree. Now there is a class of views according to which the existence of a concrete particular such as a tree is a sort of coherence of the facets, aspects, guises, noemata, intentional objects -- pick your term -- that are presented to us directly and in their turn present the thing itself.  Following Butchvarov I will use 'object' and distinguish objects from entities. The tree itself is an entity; the various facets, aspects, guises, noemata, are objects.

For example, I am seated on my porch looking at the tree.  I cannot see the whole of it, and I don't see all of the properties of the portions I do see. Seated, I enjoy a visual perception the accusative of which is (incomplete) object O1.  When I stand up, still looking at the tree, I am presented with a slightly different (incomplete) object, O2.  Advancing toward the tree, a series of objects come into view one after another.  (This makes it sound as if  the series is discrete when it is actually continuous.) Arriving at the tree, I put my hands around the trunk. The resulting object is richer than the others by the addition of tactile data, but still incomplete and therefore not identical to the completely determinate entity. But these objects all cohere and 'consubstantiate' (Castaneda) and are of one and the same entity. In their mutual cohesion, they manifest one and the same entity. They present the same infinitely-propertied entity in a manner suitable to a finite mind.

Butchvarov speaks of the material (not formal) identity of the objects.  On such a scheme the existence of an entity is naturally assayed as the indefinite identifiability of its objects.  Existence is indefinite identifiability. By whom? By the subject in question. We could call this a transcendentally-subjective theory of existence, although that is not what Butch calls it.  We find something very similar in Husserl and Hector-Neri Castaneda. In Husserl, existence is 'constituted in consciousness.' Sein reduces to Seinsinn.

On a scheme like this, existence would not be hidden but would itself be accessible, not as a separate monadic property, but as the ongoing relational coherence of objects, noemata, guises, aspects or whatever you want to call them. It would seem that the phenomenologically inclined, those who agree with Heidegger that ontology is possible only as phenomenology, would have to subscribe to some such theory of existence. 

3) On the above approach one could 'bracket' the existence in itself of the tree entity and still have available existence as indefinite identifiability.  But does this 'bracketing' (Husserl's Einklammerung) merely put existence in itself out of play or does it cancel it?I suspect it is the latter.

Let's be clear about the two senses of 'exists.' 

In the phenomenological sense, existence is the mutual cohesion of Butchvarov's objects, Castaneda's guises, Husserl's noemata.  Existence is thus accessible from the first-person point of view. It is in the open and not hidden. The question, How do I know that the tree exists? has a ready answer. I know that the tree exists from the manifest coherence of its objects, their indefinite identifiability in Butchvarov's sense.  

In the second sense, existence is such that what exists exists independently of (finite) consciousness and its synthetic activities. In this second  'realist' sense of 'exists,' things could exist even in the absence of conscious beings. Existence in this second sense is that which makes existents exist outside of their causes and outside the mind and outside of language. In the former 'idealist' sense of 'exist,' nothing could exist in the absence of consciousness. 

4) One conclusion:  if you deny that existence is hidden, then it looks like you will have to embrace some type of idealism, with its attendant problems.

5) How might existence be hidden? Suppose that everything  apart from God is kept in existence by ongoing divine creative activity. If so, each thing apart from God is an effect of the divine cause.  Its being the effect of a hidden Causa Prima is itself hidden.  My tree's being maintained in existence outside of its (secondary) causes and outside the mind  is not manifest to us. Perceiving the tree, I cannot 'read off' its createdness.  Its createdness is its existence and both are hidden.

6) My final conclusion is that no classical theist can adopt a phenomenological theory of existence.

Existence, Unity, Possibility, and Actuality: Are There Merely Possible Individuals?

Steven Nemes by e-mail:

Here’s a question for you about existence, perhaps one you could discuss on the blog.

In your book, you argue that existence is ontological unity. I think that’s right. But a merely possible this-such is a unity as much as an actual this-such. What then distinguishes merely possible existence from actual existence?

To put it precisely, the existence of a contingent being is the contingent unity of its ontological constituents.  Such a being is appropriately referred to as a this-such or as a concrete individual.  I assume that existence and actuality are the same: to exist = to be actual. I also assume that existence and Being are the same: to exist = to be.  Thus I reject the quasi-Meinongian thesis forwarded by Bertrand Russell in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics (449) according to which there ARE items that do not EXIST. 

It follows from these two assumptions that there are no individuals that are merely possible. For if there were merely possible individuals, they would have Being, but not existence.

Objection.   "This very table that I just finished building, was, before I built it, a merely possible table.  One and the same table went from being merely possible to being actual.  No temporal individual becomes actual unless it, that very individual, was previously possible.  Now the table is actual; hence it, that very individual, had to have been previously a merely possible table. A merely possible table is a table, but one that does not exist."

Reply. "I deny that a merely possible table is a table.  'Merely possible' here functions as an alienans adjective like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.'  A decoy duck is not a duck, but a hunk of wood made to appear, to a duck, as a duck. A merely possible table is not a table, but the possibility that there come to exist a table that satisfies a certain description. 

The possibility of there coming to exist a table of such-and-such a description could be understood as a set of properties, or as perhaps a big conjunctive property. Either way, the possibility would not be a possible individual.

I deny the presupposition of your question, Steven, namely, that "a merely possible this-such is a unity as much as an actual this-such."  What you are assuming is that there are merely possible individuals. A merely possible individual is a nonexistent individual, and on the view I take in my existence book, there are no nonexistent individuals. 

The next post -- scroll up -- will help you understand the subtlety of this problematic.

Can a Dead Animal be Buried?

Arguably not. Here is an argument:

1) A dead animal can be buried if and only if it is identical to its corpse.

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Therefore

3) It is not the case that a dead animal can be buried.

Argument for (2):

4) If a dead animal is identical to its corpse, then it survives its death as a corpse.

5) No animal survives its death as a corpse.

Therefore

2) A dead animal is not identical to its corpse.

Suppose you hear that I was involved in a terrible auto accident. You ask whether I survived. You get the response, "Yes, here he is in the morgue. The good news is that he survived; the bad news is that he is dead." If you find that response absurd, then you will accept (5) and with it (3), and you will understand that a dead animal cannot be buried. You will agree that you cannot bury me, "on the lone prarie" or anywhere; you can only bury my corpse which is not me. Even if I am only a living human body, I am not identical to 'my' corpse either before death or after it.

 

When an animal dies, it ceases to exist, and you cannot bury what does not exist.

But intuitions differ. Suppose that a 200 lb. man dies in his bed, and that a man is just a living material thing.  If the man ceased to exist at death, but the 200 lb. mass in the bed did not, then something new came into existence in the bed, a corpse. If that sounds absurd, you may be tempted to say that one and the same thing that was alive is now dead, and that that one thing  will be buried. So you did bury old Uncle Joe after all and not merely his remains.  And the old cowboy's request not to be buried on the lone prarie, where the coyotes howl and wind blows free, makes sense.

Welcome to the aporetics of death and burial.

The Strange Thought of Absolute Nothingness

I had the giddy thought of absolute nothingness as a boy; the old man I've become can't quite recapture in full its eldritch quality. But he can rigorously think what the boy could mainly only feel.

The boy reasoned that if God hadn't created anything, then only God would exist. But suppose no God either! And then the strangeness supervened as the boy lay in bed staring at the ceiling. There would then have been nothing, absolutely nothing! How strange!

The giddiness arose by a double subtraction. The boy subtracted creation leaving only God. Then he subtracted God leaving only nothing.  The boy was innocent of philosophy and nothing from that field impeded the supervenience of strangeness as he tried to apprehend this 'nothing.'

'Necessary being' was not in the ten-year-old's vocabulary.  The nonexistence of God is impossible if God is a necessary being.  And surely the ens realissimum, the ens absolutum, the apha and omega of the alphabet of Being, could not be a merely contingent being.  That much seems very clear to the old man.

Unfortunately, the divine necessity is not transparent to our intellects. We cannot see into the divine necessity. We have no INsight in this instance. We cannot see with indubitable evidence that God exists and cannot not exist.  Why not? I conjecture that it is because of the structure of the discursive intellect.

We think in opposites. In the present case, the opposites are essence and existence. We say that in God, essence entails existence, or essence is (identically) existence, or it is the nature of God to exist. Or perhaps we say, as I recall Saint Bonaventura saying, that if God is God, then God exists: the divine self-identity entails the divine existence.  But the sense of these claims rests on the logically prior distinction of essence and existence as two opposing factors that the discursive intellect must keep apart if it is to think clearly. And so the very sense of the claims militates against apodictic insight into their truth.

We cannot help but bring the distinction between essence and existence to God when we try to think about him.  This distinction that we cannot help but bring prevents us from rendering the divine necessity transparent to our intellects in such a way that we cannot doubt the existence of God. The objects of the finite intellect are finitized objects in which essence and existence fall asunder.  They are objects among objects subject to distinctions among distinctions.  God or the ens absolutum cannot but be a finitized object to our ectypal intellects.  God himself, however, is nothing finite, no object among objects, no token of a type, no instance of an eidos.  We cannot get what want: objective certainty of the existence of the Absolute in which there is such a tight coalescence between the intellect and its Infinite Object that no conceivable logical wedge can be driven between intellect and Object.  We want objective certainty!  Husserl: Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben!

According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion)  I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon:  no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing.  This includes God.  

Try it for yourself.  Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing.  Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score.  The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction. 

I grant that if God exists, then he necessarily exists. But this concession does not help. For one cannot infer from the divine modal status -- necessarily existent if existent -- that God exists.  For God might be impossible.  Necessarily existent if existent, but, contrapositively: impossibly existent if not existent. Anselm's Insight -- that than which no greater can be conceived is either necessary or impossible -- does not validate Anselm's Argument.

"But surely God is possible!" 

How do you know that? There is no apodictic transition from conceivability by a finite mind to possibility in reality.  Besides, you cannot mean by 'possible' 'merely possible,' possible but not actual. You must mean that God is possible in a sense of 'possible' that does not exclude actuality.  But then your argument begs the question.

I am not maintaining that the ens necessarium (God) does not exist. I am maintaining that we have no insight into God's existence that allays all possible doubts. And so we are left with the seeming possibility of absolute nothingness, and the giddiness or (Heideggerian) Angst that it elicits in some of us.

If God almighty cannot ban the specter of absolute nothingness, or hold it at bay, can anything?  Let's see.

The 'thought' that there might have been nothing at all is unthinkable. It is self-cancelling.  Here is an argument:

The following are  contradictory propositions:

1) Something exists.

2) Nothing exists.

(1) is plainly true. It follows that (2) is false.  So much for truth value. What about modal status?  Is (1) contingent or necessary? If (1) is contingent, then its negation is possible, in which case it is possible that (2) be true.  If (1) is necessary, then it is not possible that (2) be true.

Is it possible that (2) be true, that nothing exist?   Is it possible that there be nothing at all?  Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.

Think about it, muchachos!

Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist.  This of course is not a proof of God, but of something rather less impressive, a state of affairs. The state of affairs, There is something, necessarily obtains.  It cannot not obtain. And it cannot obtain necessarily without existing necessarily. Not a proof of God, but a starting point for a proof of God; in any case  an important result:   we seem to have achieved a knock-down proof of the necessary existence of something by sheer thinking.  Thought makes certain contact with reality 'by its own power' without the mediation of the senses, or anything else for that matter, including divine revelation. Parmenides vindicatus est.

If this is right, then the thought of absolute nothingness is an unthinkable thought, hence no thought at all, a product of confusion, a 'ghost' to be dispelled by clear thinking.   My ten-year-0ld self was perhaps 'spooked' by an unthinkable thought.  Hence, the eldritch quality, the strangeness the old man cannot forget. It was perhaps only an emotional state induced by an attempt to overstep the bounds of intelligibility. Perhaps the boy succumbed to a purely subjective emotional state bare of cognitive content, bereft of intentionality, revelatory of nothing. Hence the giddy strangeness, a close cousin to Heidegger's Angst.

Up to this point Father Parmenides would agree. 

But then what of the Humean reasoning? Does it not clamor for 'equal time'?  An aporia threatens:

(H) Nothing is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.

(P) Something is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.

I don't know how to resolve this contradiction.  I am of two minds.  Parmenides and Hume are battling for hegemony in my shallow pate.

Can I conceive (think without internal logical contradiction) the nonexistence of what is the case, or a total way things are? 

The Humean-Heideggerian part of my mind says Yes: you are thinking the thought of radical contingency. Everything is contingent including there being anything at all. There really might have been nothing at all. And this real possibility is a live one, moment to moment. There is no ultimate metaphysical support anywhere.  That there is anything at all is a brute fact, a fact without cause or explanation, and thus a fact wholly unintelligible, hence ab-surd, We are hanging in the Void. Ich habe Angst vor dem Nichts!  Heidegger's Angst and Sartre's nausea are revelatory emotions: they reveal, respectively, the ultimate nothingness at the base of all that exists, and the ultimate absurdity or unintelligibility of the existing of what exists.

The Parmenidean part of my mind says No:  Thought and Being are 'the same.'  You have grasped by sheer thought alone the absolute necessity of  there being a way things are, an ultimate context. And so you were indeed 'spooked' as a boy when it seemed you looked into the abyss of utter nothingness and contextlessness.

 

Some Responses to Tim Mosteller re: Existence

The following is from a work in progress by Tim Mosteller, posted with his permission.  I thank him for his critical engagement with my work. Here are some responses.  My corrections in red; my comments in blue.

On J. P. Moreland's Theory of Existence

A re-post from February of 2016 with corrections and addenda.

 

What follows is largely a summary and restatement of points I make in "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58.  It is a 'popular' or 'bloggity-blog' version of a part of that lengthy technical article.  First I summarize my agreements with J. P. Moreland.   Then I explain and raise two objections to his theory.  The Moreland text I have under my logical microscope is pp. 134-139 of his 2001 Universals (McGill-Queen's University Press). 

 

Common Ground with Moreland on Existence

We agree on the following five points (which is not to say that Moreland will agree with every detail of my explanation of these five points):

1) Existence is attributable to individuals.  The cat that just jumped into my lap exists.  This very cat, Manny, exists.  Existence belongs to it and is meaningfully attributable to it.  Pace Frege and Russell, 'Manny exists' is a meaningful sentence, and it is meaningful as it stands, as predicating existence of an individual.  It is nothing like 'Manny is numerous.' To argue that since cats are numerous, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny is numerous is to commit the fallacy of division.  Russell held that the same fallacy is committed by someone who thinks that since cats exist, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny exists.  But Russell was mistaken: there is no fallacy of division; there is an equivocation on 'exists.'  It has a general or second-level use and a singular or first-level  use.

There are admissible first-level uses of '. . .exist(s).'  It is not the case that only second-level uses are admissible. And it is only because Manny, or some other individual cat, exists that the concept cat is instantiated.  The existence of an individual cannot be reduced to the being-instantiated of a property or concept.  If you like, you can say that the existence of a concept is its being instantiated.  We sometimes speak like that.  A typical utterance of 'Beauty exists,' say, is not intended to convey that Beauty itself exists, but is intended to convey that Beauty is exemplified, that there are beautiful things.  But then one is speaking of general existence, not of singular existence. 

Clearly, general existence presupposes singular existence in the following sense:  if a first-level concept or property is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual, and this individual must exist in order to stand in the instantiation nexus to a concept or property.  From here on out, by 'existence' I mean 'singular existence.'  There is really no need for 'general existence' inasmuch as we can speak of instantiation or of someness, as when we say that cats exist if and only something is a cat. The fundamental error of what Peter van Inwagen calls the 'thin theory' of existence is to imagine that existence can be reduced to the purely logical notion of someness.  That would be to suppose, falsely, that singular existence can be dispensed with in favor of general existence.  Existence is not a merely logical topic ; existence is a metaphysical topic.

2) Existence cannot be an ordinary property of individuals.  While existence is attributable to individuals, it is no ordinary property of them, and if one were to define properties as instantiable entities,  it is no property at all.   There are several reasons for this, but I will mention only one:  you cannot add to a thing's description by saying of it that it exists. Nothing is added to the description of a tomato if one adds 'exists' to its descriptors: 'red,' round,' ripe,' etc.   As Kant famously observed, "Being is not a real predicate," i.e., being or existence adds nothing to the realitas or whatness of a thing. Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, Kant did not anticipate the Frege-Russell theory.  He does not deny that 'exist(s)' is an admissible first-level predicate.  (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75, esp. 48-50.)

3) Existence is not a classificatory concept or property.  The reason is simple: there is no logically prior domain of items classifiable as either existent or nonexistent.  Pace Meinong, everything exists.  There are no nonexistent items.  On Meinong's view, some items actually have properties despite having no Being at all.

4) Existence makes a real difference to a thing that exists.  In one sense existence adds nothing to a thing.  It adds nothing quidditative.  In another sense it adds everything:  if a thing does not exist, it is nothing at all! To be or not to be -- not just a question, but the most 'abysmal' difference conceivable.    In this connection, Moreland rightly speaks of a "real difference between existence and non-existence." (137)

5) Existence itself exists.  This is not the trivial claim that existing things exist.  It is the momentous claim that that in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists.  It is a logical consequence of (4) in conjunction with (3). As Moreland puts it, "[i]f existence itself does not exist, then nothing else could exist in virtue of having existence." (135)

The above five points are criteria of adequacy for a theory of existence: any adequate theory must include or entail each of these points.   Most philosophers nowadays will not agree, but  I think Moreland will.  So he and I stand on common ground.  I should think that the only fruitful disputes are those that play out over a large chunk of common ground. 

But these criteria of adequacy also pose a problem:  How can existence belong to individuals without being a property of them?  Existence belongs to individuals as it would not belong to them if it were a property of properties or concepts; but it is not a property of individuals.  How can we uphold both of these insights?

Moreland's Theory

Moreland's theory gets off to a good start:  "existence is not a property which belongs, but is the belonging of a property." (137)  This insight nicely accommodates points (1) and (2) above:  existence is attributable to individuals without being an ordinary property of them.  Indeed, it is not a property at all. I infer from this that existence is not the property of having properties. It is rather the mutual belongingness of a thing and its properties.  Moreland continues:

Existence is the entering into the exemplification nexus . . . . In the case of Tony the tiger, the fact [that] the property of being a tiger belongs to something and that something has this property belonging to it is what confers existence. (137)

I take this to mean that existence is the mutual belonging together of individual and property.   It is 'between' a thing and its properties as that which unifies them, thereby tying them into a concrete fact or state of affairs.  The existence of Tony is not one of his properties; nor is the existence of Tony identical to  Tony.   And of course the existence of Tony is not the being-exemplified of some such haecceity property as identity-with-Tony.  Rather, the existence of Tony, of that very individual, is his exemplifying of his properties. The existence of a (thick) individual in general is then the exemplification relation itself insofar as this relation actually relates (thin) individual and properties.  Existence is not a first-level property, or a second-level property, but a very special relation, the exemplification relation.

Moreland implies as much.  In answer to the question how existence itself exists, he explains that "The belonging-to (exemplification, predication) relation is itself exemplified . . ." (137)  Thus the asymmetrical exemplification relation x exemplifies P is exemplified by Tony and the property of being a tiger (in that order). Existence itself exists because existence itself is the universal exemplification relation which is itself exemplified.  It exists in that it is exemplified by a and F-ness, a and G-ness, a and H-ness, b and F-ness, b and G-ness, b and H-ness, and so on.  An individual existent exists in that its ontological constituents (thin particular and properties) exemplify the dyadic exemplification relation which is existence itself.

The basic idea is this.  The existence of a thick particular such as Tony, that is, a particular taken together with all its monadic properties, is the unity of its ontological constituents.  (This is not just any old kind of unity, of course, but a type of unity that ties items that are not facts into a fact.)  This unity is brought about by the dyadic exemplification relation within the thick particular.   The terms of this relation are the thin particular on the one hand and the properties on the other. 

Moreland's theory accommodates all five of the desiderata listed above which in my book is a strong point in its favor.

A Bradleyan Difficulty

A sentence such as 'Al is fat' is not a list of its constituent words.  The sentence is either true or false, but neither the corresponding list, nor any item on the list, is either true or false.  So there is something more to a declarative sentence than its constituent words.  Something very similar holds for the fact that makes the sentence true, if it is true.  I mean the extralinguistic fact of Al's being fat.  The primary constituents of this fact, Al and fatness, can exist without the fact existing. The fact, therefore, cannot be identified with its primary constituents, taken either singly, or collectively.    A fact is more than its primary constituents.  But how are we to account for this 'more'? 

On Moreland's theory, as I understand it, this problem is solved by adding a secondary constituent, the exemplification relation, call it EX, whose task is to connect the primary constituents.  This relation ties the primary constituents into a fact.  It is what makes a fact more than its primary constituents.  Unfortunately, this proposal leads to Bradley's Regress. For if Al + fatness do not add up to the fact of Al's being fat, then Al + fatness + EX won't either.  If Al and fatness can exist without forming the fact of Al's being fat, then Al and fatness and EX can all exist without forming the fact in question.  How can adding a constituent to the primary constituents bring about the fact-constituting unity of all constituents?  EX has not only to connect a and F-ness, but also to connect itself to a and to F-ness.  How can it do the latter?  The answer to this, presumably, will be that EX is a relation and the business of a relation is to relate. EX, relating itself to a and to F-ness, relates them to each other.  EX is an active ingredient in the fact, not an inert ingredient.  It is a relating relation, and not just one more constituent that needs relating to the others by something distinct from itself.  For this reason, Bradley's regress can't get started.  This is a stock response one can find in Brand Blanshard and others, but it is not a good one.

The problem is that EX can exist without relating the relata that it happens to relate in a given case.  This is because EX is a universal.  If it were a relation-instance as on D. W. Mertz's theory, then it would be a particular, an unrepeatable, and could not exist apart from the very items it relates.   Bradley's regress could not then arise.  But if EX is a universal, then it can exist without relating any specific relata that it does relate, even though, as an immanent universal, it must relate some relata or other.  This implies that a relation's relating what it relates is contingent to its being the relation it is.  For example, x loves y contingently relates Al and Barbara, which implies that the relation is distinct from its relating.  The same goes for EX: it is distinct from its relating.  It is more than just a constituent of any fact into which it enters; it is a constituent that does something to the other constituents, and in so doing does something to itself, namely, connect itself to the other constituents.  Relating relations are active ingredients in facts, not inert ingredients.  Or we could say that a relating relation is ontologically participial in addition to its being ontologically substantival.  And since the relating is contingent in any given case, the relating in any given case requires a ground.  What could this ground be? 

My claim is that it cannot be any relation, including the relation, Exemplification.  No relation, by itself, is ontologically participial. More generally, no constituent of a fact can serve as ontological ground of the unity of a fact's constituents.  For any such putatively unifying constituent will either need a further really unifying constituent to connect it to what it connects, in which case Bradley's regress is up and running, or the unifying constituent will have to be ascribed a 'magical' power, a power no abstract object could possess, namely, the power to unify itself with what it unifies.  Such an item would be a self-grounding ground: a ground of unity that grounds its unity with that which it unifies.  The synthetic unity at the heart of each contingent fact needs to be grounded in an act of synthesis that cannot be brought about by any constituent of a fact, or by the fact itself. 

My first objection to Moreland's theory may be put as follows.  The existence of a thick particular (which we are assaying as a concrete fact along the lines of Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong) cannot be the fact's constituents' standing in the exemplification relation.  And existence itself, existence in its difference from existents, cannot be identified with the exemplification relation.

Can Existence Exist Without Being Uniquely Self-Existent?

I agree with Moreland that existence itself exists.  One reason was supplied by Reinhardt Grossmann: "If existence did not exist, then nothing would exist." (Categorial Structure of the World, 405) But I have trouble with the notion that existence itself is the exemplification relation.  Existence as that which is common to all that exists, and as that in virtue of which everything exists cannot be just one more thing that exists.  Existence cannot be a member of an extant category that admits of multiple membership, such as the category of relations.  For reasons like these such penetrating minds as Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Panayot Butchvarov have denied that existence itself exists. 

In my 2002 existence book I proposed a synthesis of these competing theses:  Existence exists as a paradigm existent, one whose mode of existence is radically different from the mode of existence of the beings ontologically dependent on it.  From this point of view, Moreland has a genuine insight, but he has not taken it far enough: he stops short at the dubious view that existence is the relation of exemplification.  But if you drive all the way down the road with me you end up at Divine Simplicity, which Moreland has  good reasons for rejecting.

The Presentism of E. J. Lowe: Summary

This entry is Part One of a multi-part attempt to understand and evaluate the late E. J. Lowe's 'untimely' version of presentism.  It is 'untimely' in that he resists what he takes to be the reification of time and times, and because his presentism is very different from its contemporary competitors. I am basing my interpretation mainly on "Presentism and Relativity: No Conflict" in Ciuni, et al. eds., New Papers on the Present (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2013, 133-152) and on "How Real is Substantial Change," The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3 (2006), 275-293. Page references in parentheses refer to the first article unless otherwise noted. All emphases are in the original.

1) Lowe insists on "The ontological primacy of present reality and the objective status of temporal passage." (133)  These commitments justify calling him a presentist.

2) But he "repudiates [what he takes to be] the reification of time and 'times,' including the 'present moment' . . . ." (133) To reify is to treat as real what is not real. Lowe appears to be saying that there are no such items as times, and thus no such item as the present time. If so, one cannot quantify over times.  This would seem to scotch fairly standard definitions or definition-schemata of 'presentism' along the following lines:

(P1) Always, only present items exist.

That is: every time is such that only what is non-relationally present at that time exists simpliciter. 

3) The focus for Lowe is not on the present moment, but on the "fundamental reality of change . . . ." (133)

4) Change, however, is in every case "existence change -- that is, the coming into or going out of existence of entities of one kind or another . . . ." (133) We are being told that all change is existential or substantial change.  (See The Monist article cited above.) Now one kind of change is qualitative change as when a tomato goes from being green to being red.  This can be understood to be a species of existence change if properties are assayed as  tropes. The greenness trope in the tomato goes out of existence and  a redness trope comes into existence while the tomato stays in existence.  On this way of thinking, both the coming into existence of the tomato and its change of color are existential changes.

5) Objects (individual substances) change, but there are no events in addition to these changes.  We need only the object and its tropes: we need no events such as the event of a leaf's turning brown. Furthermore, there is no event of a trope's going out of existence or coming into existence.  If there were, a vicious infinite regress would ensue. (150) Events are "shadows cast by language rather than fundamental ingredients of temporal reality." (151) There are changes, but no events. I take Lowe to be saying that an event is an (illicit) reification of a change.  If an animal dies, there is no such event as the animal's death in addition to the dead animal. There is just the animal which ceases to exist. (137)

6) Because there are no events, change cannot be ascribed to events. Because there is no such entity as my birth, my birth has no properties such as occurring at a certain place or being past.  Because there are no events, no events change in their A-determinations, their monadic (non-relational) pastness, presentness, and futurity.  There is thus no event, my birth, that was once future, then present, then past, and then ever more past. To think otherwise is to confuse events with objects, which amounts to a reification of events, an illicit treatment of them as if they are objects when all they could be are changes in objects.

7) It is not just that nothing has A-determinations; there are no such determinations to be had. McTaggart's A-determinations  are pseudo-properties based on a "false analogy between events and objects." (136)  There are no times, no events, and no A-determinations. This puts paid to McTaggart's claim that the A-series is contradictory, which is a key lemma in his overall argument for the unreality of time.  That lemma requires that there be events and A-determinations.  Very roughly, what McTaggart argues is that time is unreal because (i) time requires the A-series, but (ii) said series is contradictory in that each event has all three of the A-determinations. D. H. Mellor is a contemporary philosopher of time who accepts McTaggart's argument against the A-series, but concludes, not that time is unreal, but that time is exhausted by the B-series.

8) But if there are no events, then there is no B-series either. There is no series of events ordered by the so-called B-relations, earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  This puts paid to the view of D. H. Mellor and others that real time (to allude to the title of Mellor's book) is exhausted by the B-series.  For Lowe, then, there are no times, no events, no A-series, and no B-series.

9) For Lowe, time is objectively real; it is not unreal as on McTaggart's view, nor is it in any sense   transcendentally ideal (Kant) or constituted in consciousness (Husserl).  But it is not real in the manner of a container or a dimension.  Time is just temporal passage.  Since time is objectively real, temporal passage is also objectively real and in no way mind-dependent.  Temporal passage "consists in the continual coming into and going out of existence of entities . . . ." (137) Lowe is referring to temporal entities only, those that are not timeless such as propositions. He has in mind objects (individual substances) such as a cat and its properties (assayed as tropes) such as being asleep.  This ceaseless existential change is what temporal passage consists in. In sum, for Lowe, time = temporal passage = the ever ongoing creation and annihilation of entities.

As I read him, Lowe is not maintaining that to exist = to be temporally present tout court, but that for temporal items, to exist = to be temporally present. This makes him an existence presentist with respect to temporalia. Recall that for Lowe, all change is existential (substantial) change. See (4) supra. 

10) We tend to think of time as the dimension of change, a fourth dimension in addition to the three spatial dimensions.  We tend to assume that "time is a dimension in which reality as a whole is extended." (Monist, 283)  If you think that objects persist by perduring, by having different temporal parts at different times, then you are making this assumption.  But most, though not all, endurantists make the same assumption when they say that an object endures by being 'wholly present' at each time at which the object exists. Lowe denies that time is a dimension. For if there are no times ordered by the B-relations, earlier and later, then time is not a dimension. Reality is not temporally extended.  Lowe seeks to uphold an endurantism that does not presuppose that time is a dimension.

11) Lowe's view of time is thoroughly dynamic by contrast with the static character of time on eternalism, and with the partially static and partially dynamic theories of Growing Block and Spotlight.  The reality of time "consists simply in the reality of change . . . . (140)  The latter "constitutes" temporal passage.  This of course implies that without change, there is no time; but we can live with that.  What's more, there are no events and there are no times, and so there is no present time.  Lowe concludes that we need no account of what times are, and in particular, no "ersatzist" account of time in terms of abstract objects such as propositions. He is opposing views like that of Craig Bourne, for whom "a time is a set of propositions that states the other truths about what happens at that time." (A Future for Presentism, Oxford UP, 2006, 52.)

12) The view that all change is existential change commits Lowe to the view that properties of things in time are not universals but tropes or modes (particularized properties). These are not temporal parts of objects.  (141) Tropes are therefore consistent with endurantism.  Suppose that a changes from being F at t1 to G at t2.  "We can continue to say that a itself exists at both t1 and t2 despite having no temporal parts, thus being, in that sense, 'wholly present' at both of these times." (141) I note in passing how Lowe helps himself to talk of times. 

13) The object that has tropes is neither a bundle of tropes not a bare particular or substratum that supports them. The 'relation' between an object and its tropes is left unclear. (141).

14)  Objects persist through changes in intrinsic properties. How? Change in intrinsic properties occurs when "monadic tropes"  successively "come into and go out of existence while it (the object) stays in existence." (142)

15)  Lowe's presentism: "When 'time passes' the content of reality itself changes -- entities come into and go out of existence." This is intended "literally and absolutely." Going out of existence is absolute annihilation. (146)  But then coming into existence would have to be creation out of nothing, would it not?

16) Yet "some things that exist today already existed yesterday." (146) For example, the very same person who exists and is 'wholly present' now also existed and was 'wholly present' yesterday. (146)

17) Only present objects and tropes exist.  The sum-total of these entities is ever changing. What ceases to be present is annihilated. But not everything that exists at present is annihilated at the same time.  Suppose Elliot, who was drunk yesterday, is sober today.  Elliot yesterday co-existed with a D-trope, and Elliot today co-exists with an S-trope. The tropes, however,  are not coexistent with each other since the D-trope was annihilated by the passage of time while the S-trope presently exists. Lowe's presentism thus implies the non-transitivity of co-existence. It also implies that, while temporal reality is ever created and annihilated by  the passage of time, not everything is annihilated or created at the same time.  The annihilation of Elliot's drunkenness left Elliot the object unscathed. 

Existence is Tenseless

The Ostrich inquires,

You hold that [instances of] both (1) and (2) below are true.

               (1) X is no longer temporally present and (2) X exists tenselessly.

Fair enough. But what does ‘exist tenselessly’ mean?

To exist tenselessly is just to exist. To exist is to be something. More precisely, it is to be identical to something or other:

Q. Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff for some y, y = x.

For example,

a. Quine exists iff Quine = Quine.

Now is (a) true at all times, or only at some times? At all times. For at no time is Quine self-diverse.  This commits me to the affirmation of permanentism and the denial of transientism:

P. It is always the case that everything in time exists at every time.

T. Sometimes something begins to exist, and sometimes something ceases to exist.

Now if nothing begins to exist and nothing ceases to exist, then the A-determinations (pastness, presentness, and futurity) are purely temporal and not at all existential. This is why, from

b. The Berlin Wall is no longer present

one cannot validly infer

c. The Berlin Wall does not exist.

Although nothing begins to exist and nothing ceases to exist, some items begin to be temporally present and some items cease to be temporally present.

Now presentism includes transientism.  Having rejected transientism, I must also reject presentism, the view that it is always the case that whatever exists exists at present.

Is it a substantive metaphysical question whether permanentism or presentism is true?  I should think that it is. It is a question about the nature of existence: Is existence time-independent or not?    

Continuing the Discussion of Time, Tense, and Existence

This just in from London.  I've intercalated my responses.

Here is another take. We agree on our disagreement about the following consequence

(A)  X is no longer temporally present, therefore X has ceased to exist.

You think it is not valid, i.e. you think the antecedent could be true with the consequent false. I think it is valid.

BV: Yes. So far, so good. 

However regarding

          (B) X is no longer temporally present, therefore X does not still exist

we seem to agree. We both think the antecedent cannot be true with the consequent false.

BV:  Right.  For example, we agree BOTH that the Berlin Wall is no longer temporally present (and is therefore temporally past) AND that the Berlin Wall does not still exist.  I should think that we also, as competent speakers of English, agree that locutions of the form 'X still exists' are intersubstitutable both salva veritate and salva significatione with locutions of the form 'X existed and X exists' where all of the verbs are tensed and none are tense-neutral or tenseless. Agree?  My second comment has no philosophical implications.  It is merely a comment on the meaning/use of a stock English locution.

My puzzle is that my reading, and I think a natural reading, is that (A) and (B) mean the same, because “X has ceased to exist” and “X does not still exist” mean the same. You clearly disagree.

BV:  If we stick to tensed language, then 'X has ceased to exist' and 'X does not still exist' mean the same.  So I don't disagree if we adhere to tensed language. But note that 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as between

a) X has ceased to presently-exist (or present-tensedly exist)

and

b) X has ceased to be anything at all (and thus has become nothing at all).

For example, the Berlin Wall has ceased to presently-exist.  But it doesn't follow that said wall has become nothing, that it is no longer a member of the totality of entities, that it has been annihilated by the mere passage of time.  If you think that it is no longer a member of said totality, then you are assuming presentism and begging the question against me.  You have restricted the totality of what exists to what presently exists. Note that I do not deny that one can move validly from the premise of (A) to its conclusion if one invokes presentism as an auxiliary premise. My claim is that the inference fails as a direct or immediate inference.

I think you want to argue that there is a covert tensing in “X does not still exist” which is absent in “X has ceased to exist”, which (according to you) is tenseless. But how? Doesn’t the verb ‘cease’ always imply a time at which X ceased to exist? Would it make sense to say that 2+2 has ceased to equal 4? How?

BV: In 'X does not still exist,' 'exist' is present-tensed.  But 'X has ceased to exist' is ambiguous as explained above . It can be read your tensed way, but it can also be read in my tenseless way.  Surely you don't want to say that 'exists' has exactly the same meaning /sense as 'exists-now' or 'exists' (present tense).  We could call that semantic presentism. I don't think anyone is a semantic presentist.  And for good reason. You, as a nominalist, will not countenance abstracta such as numbers and sets and the other denizens of the Platonic menagerie. But you understand what you are opposing when you oppose their admission into our ontology in the Quinean sense (our catalog by category of what there is).  And so you understand the notion of tenseless existence and tenseless property possession as when a 'Platonist' says that 7 is prime. The copula is tenseless, not present-tensed.

So, in summary, my problem (and I am always seeing problems) is how you think (A) and (B) differ.

Over to you.

BV: The Boston Blizzard of '78 was one hell of a storm. When it ended, did it cease to exist? Yes of course, if we are using 'exist' in the ordinary present-tensed way. The storm because wholly past, and in becoming wholly past it stopped being presently existent. Obviously, nothing can exist at present if it is wholly past.  And it is quite clear that what no longer is present is not still present, and that what no longer presently exists is not still presently existent.

So far, nothing but platitudes of ordinary usage.  Nothing metaphysical. 

We venture into metaphysics when we ask: Does it follow straightaway from the storm's having become wholly temporally past, that it is nothing at all?  I say No. If you say Yes, then you are endorsing presentism, a controversial metaphysical theory. 

You can avoid controversy if you stick to ordinary language.  If you have trouble doing this, Wittgensteinian therapy may be helpful.

Time and the Existing Dead

Another round with David Brightly.  My responses are in blue.

Bill says,

We don't want to say that a dead man becomes nothing after death since he remains a particular, completely determinate, dead man distinct from others. If the dead become nothing after death then all the dead would be the same. If your dead father and your dead mother are both nothing, then there is nothing to distinguish them.

It's difficult to know what to make of this.  My guess is that Bill is conflating a thing with the idea of a thing. 

BV: I plead innocent. I hope David doesn't think that when a person dies, that person becomes an idea.  My veridical memories of my dead mother are memories of a woman not an idea.

First, 'particular' and 'completely determinate' do not denote properties of  concrete objects like men.  One can contrast 'I have in mind a particular man' with 'I have in mind a man' but 'particular' here qualifies not 'man' but rather the way of having in mind.  'Completely determinate' functions in a similar way.  What would 'partially determinate man' denote?  A partially determinate idea of a man makes sense, however; we know some of his properties but not others. 

BV: I beg to differ. Granted, my idea of David is incomplete: I know some of his properties but not others. But David is not the same as my idea of him, and that's a good thing for both of us. I say that David himself is complete (completely determinate), just like everything else that exists mind-independently.  It makes sense to say both that my idea of David is incomplete, and that David himself is complete.  The fact that there cannot be an incomplete man cannot be used to show that 'complete' cannot be a predicate of concrete items.  So why does David think that?

David may be relying on a Contrast Argument one form of which is as follows:

1) If a term T is meaningful, then there are items to which T does not apply.
2) There are no items to which T does not apply.
Ergo
3) T is not meaningful.

In the present case:

4) If 'complete' is a meaningful term, then there are concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
5) There are no concrete items to which 'complete' does not apply.
Ergo
6) 'Complete' is not a meaningful term.

Well, I reject Contrast Arguments. Bang on the link.  Similarly with 'particular.'  David appears to believe, pace Meinong, that there are no incomplete items in reality, and that all incompleteness is epistemic.  I think so too. But that is not the issue.  The issue is whether 'particular' and 'complete' can be predicated meaningfully of items like David and his dogs, or whether they qualify merely the way one has these things in mind.  He hasn't given me a good reason to change my view. 

Second, 'dead' is an alienating adjective.  If a man is a living thing and 'dead' means non-living, then a 'dead man' is a somewhat contradictory conception.  Better to think of 'is dead' as 'has died'.  A dead man is one who has passed through that final event that all living things inevitably come to, and has ceased to be. 

BV: Very tricky!  No doubt there are alienans adjectives (bang on the link), but is 'dead' (juxtaposed with 'man') one of them?  Clearly, a decoy duck is not a duck. But it is not clear that a dead duck is not a duck.  Now the corpse of a duck is not a duck.  But if your pet duck Donald dies you can still utter truths about him and have veridical memories of him. Those truths and memories are about a duck that has died, a particular duck, not a rabbit. And not about nothing. Try this triad on for size:

a) Tom Petty is a man.
b) Tom Petty is dead. (Tom Petty has died.)
c) Nothing dead is a man. (Nothing that has died is a man.)

Clearly, the singer is a man, not a duck or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy.  And clearly, Petty is dead. It seems to follow that Petty is a dead man.  So it seems we ought to reject (c) above.  Is (c) not more reasonably rejected than the other two limbs of the triad? I would say so.

Granted, Petty is not the man he used to be.  He no longer breathes, for example.  He has lost much of the typical functionality of a man. So there is rational pressure to deny (a).  There does not appear to be a clean solution to the (a)-(c) puzzle.  The propositions cannot all be true. But it is not obvious which of them to reject.

David tells us that a dead man has ceased to be. (I will assume that to be = to exist.)  But it is not at all clear that a dead man such as Tom Petty has ceased to exist.  On one way of looking at it, Petty exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do. We both tenselessly exist.  It is just that every moment of his existence is earlier than the present moment, whereas this is not the case for me.  Petty is wholly past whereas I exist at present, and presumably also in future.  But we both exist (tenselessly)!  This is a possible view, and distinguished thinkers have subscribed to it, Albert Einstein to mention one. So it is not obvious, pace David, that when a man or a dog or any living thing dies, it ceases to exist.  David may be assuming that only what exists (present tense), exists.  But this is a miserable tautology unless David can supply a non-presentist reading of the second occurrence of 'exists.'

Third, to speak of 'becoming nothing' on death is misleading.  Death is the end of all becoming.  One has finally begone, as it were. [?] It's not that the dead lack something to distinguish them. Rather, they are not there to be distinguished one from another.  But this is not to say that my parents were indistinguishable as objects.  Nor is it to say that my thoughts about my parents are now indistinguishable.  Surely I can say, My mother was short and my father was tall. 

BV: David can say these things, but these past-tensed truths are (i) logically contingent and (ii) true at present.  So they need truthmakers that exist at present.  What might these be if only what exists at present exists?  This, in nuce, is the grounding objection to presentism. I don't see that David has a good answer to it. If, however, existence is tenseless, then the truthmakers are easily supplied. 

DB quoting BV: Nor do we want to say that a person who dies goes from being actual to being merely possible. There is clearly a distinction between an actual past individual and a merely possible past individual.  Schopenhauer is an actual past individual; his only son Willy is a merely possible past individual

Once again I'm afraid I can't regard 'being actual' and 'being merely possible' as denoting properties of individuals. How these predications are to be understood is not an easy question.  Suffice it to say that there is clearly a problem with  'Schopenhauer's only son Willy' when the philosopher's only child was a daughter.

BV: I don't get the daughter bit.  But surely David is an actual individual, not a merely possible individual.  I have no idea why he balks at this.  He is actual, not merely possible, or necessary, or impossible.  What's more, he is contingent: although he actually exists, he is possibly such that he does not exist.  There is no necessity that he exist at any time at which he exists.  And note that if 'actual' is true of everything, it does not follow that 'actual' is not a meaningful term.

DB quoting BV: On the 'growing block' theory, dead Petty exists. (This is obviously not a present-tensed use of 'exists.') He does not exist at present, but he exists in the sense that he belongs to the actual world.  Once actual, always actual. Is this wholly clear? No, but it is tolerably clear and plausible. After all, we are making singular reference to Petty, a concrete actual individual, as we speak, and this is a good reason to hold that he exists, not at present of course, but simpliciter.

The 'growing block' theory sounds like a kind of four-dimensionalism deriving from the physicist's notion of spacetime as a four-dimensional manifold.  We trace the world-lines of the particles that were ever part of Petty and we find that they form a densely packed blob within a certain spacetime region.  We are tempted to identify the contents of this region with Petty himself.  If we think of the ensemble of worldlines of all material particles as the actual world itself, then yes, the Petty blob seems indeed to belong to the actual world.  But this is a mistake.  The worldline of a particle represents not so much the particle itself but rather its history.  Likewise the blob we take to be Petty represents his biography, in mind-numbing detail.  We are confusing a thing with the life it lived.  Of course Petty belonged to the world---I don't see quite what 'actual' adds here---it's just that he does not belong to it any more.  Perhaps Bill is emphasising that Petty was a real man, not, say, a character in a fiction like Spinal Tap.  There is more than a hint here that Bill is appealing to a theory of direct reference.  Petty has to exist in order that we may refer to him.

BV: There are several gnarly issues that need disentangling. I'll leave that for later. David tells us that Petty was actual but is not now actual.  That is true, but trivial.   It may be that what David is advocating is that we simply use tensed language and not make any trouble for ourselves by asking such as questions as: what makes it true that Petty was a musician?  It may be that he is a tautological presentist who maintains that whatever exists, exists, where 'exists' in both occurrences is present-tensed.  It may be that he is refusing to stray from ordinary English and credit such high-flying metaphysical questions as: Is the whole of reality restricted to the present moment or not?

Rand and Peikoff on God and Existence

The following is by Leonard Peikoff, acolyte of Ayn Rand:

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics . . . .

Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.

Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.

Most professional philosophers consider Rand and Co. not worth discussing.  Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus, however, is one of my mottoes (see here for explanation); so I will engage the Randian ideas to see if they generate any light. But I will try to avoid the polemical and tabloid style Rand and friends favor.  

In the quotation above we meet once again our old friend 'Existence exists.'  Ayn Rand & Co. use 'existence' to refer to what exists, not to something -- a property perhaps -- in virtue of which existents exist.  Now It cannot be denied that all existing things exist, and that only existing things exist.  This is entirely trivial, a logical truth.  Anyone who denies it embraces the following formal-logical contradiction:  There are existing things that do not exist. We should all agree, then, with the first sentence of the second paragraph. Existence exists!

So far, so good. 

But then Peikoff tells us that to postulate something supernatural such as God is "to postulate something beyond existence."  Now it may well be that there is no God or anything beyond nature.  But how would it follow that there is something beyond existence, i.e., beyond what exists, if God exists? It may well be that everything that exists is a thing of nature.   Distinguished philosophers have held that reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.  But the nonexistence of God or of so-called abstract objects does not follow from the triviality that everything that exists exists.  Does it take a genius to see that the following argument is invalid?

1. Existence exists.

ergo

2. God does not exist.

One cannot derive a substantive metaphysical conclusion from a mere tautology. No doubt, whatever exists exists.  But one cannot exclude God from the company of what exists by asserting the tautology that whatever exists exists.  The above argument is a non sequitur.  Here is an example of a valid argument:

3. Nothing supernatural exists.

4. God is supernatural.

ergo

5. God does not exist.

For Peikoff to get the result he wants, the nonexistence of God, from the premise 'Existence exists,' he must conflate 'existence' with 'natural existence.' Instead of saying "only existence exists," he should have said 'only natural existence exists.' But then he would lose the self-evidence of "Existence exists and only existence exists."  And he would also be begging the question.

Conflating a trivial self-evident thesis with a nontrivial controversial thesis has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Russell said in a different connection.  It would take a certain amount of honest philosophical toil to construct a really good argument for the nonexistence of any and all supernatural entities.  But terminological mischief is easy.  What Peikoff seems to be doing above is smuggling the nonexistence of the supernatural into the term 'existence'  Clearly, this is an intellectually disreputable move.  

It is like a bad ontological argument in reverse.  On one bad version of the ontological argument, one defines God into existence by smuggling the notion of existence into the concept of God and then announcing that since we have the concept of God, God must exist.  Peikoff is doing the opposite: he defines God and the supernatural out of existence by importing their nonexistence into the term 'existence.'  But you can no more define God out of existence than you can define him into existence.  

An Objection and a Reply

"You are missing something important.  The claim that existence exists is the claim that whatever exists, exists independently of all consciousness, including divine consciousness.  It is a substantive claim, not a mere tautology.  It is a claim about the nature of existence.  It asserts the primacy of existence over consciousness.  It is a statement of extreme metaphysical realism: to exist is to be independent of all minds and their states. This axiom implies that no existents are created or caused to exist by a mind.   But then God, as the creator of everything distinct from himself, cannot exist."

Here, then, is a Rand-inspired argument for the nonexistence of God resting on Rand's axiom of existence.

1) To exist is to exist independently of all consciousness. (The notorious axiom)

2) Things other than God exist. (Obviously true)

Therefore

3) Things other than God exist independently of all consciousness. (Follows from 1 and 2)

4) If God exists, then it is not the case that everything that exists exists independently of all consciousness. (True given the classical conception of God as creator according to which whatever exists that is not God is maintained in existence moment-by-moment by God's creative power.)

Therefore

5) God does not exist. (Follows from 3 and 4 by standard logical rules including modus tollens)

This argument stands and falls with its first premise. Why should we accept it?  It is not self-evident.  Its negation -- some items that exist depend for their existence on consciousness -- is not a contradiction. Indeed, the negation is true: my current headache pain exists but it would not not exist were I not conscious of it.  My felt pain depends for its existence on consciousness.

Note also that the argument can be run in reverse with no breach of logical propriety. Simply deny the conclusion and then infer the negation of the initial premise. In brief: if God exists, then Rand's existence axiom is false.  This shows that the argument is not rationally compelling. Of course, the argument run in reverse is also not rationally compelling. So we have a stand-off.

We read above that existence, i.e. existents, are uncreated, indestructible, and eternal.  Well, if there is no God, then existents are uncreated.  But how could they be indestructible?  Is the Moon indestructible? Obviously not.  Is there anything in nature that is indestructible? No. So what might Rand or rather Peikoff mean by his strange assertion?  Does he mean that, while each natural item is destructible, it is 'indestructible' that there be some natural items or other? 

And how can natural items be eternal? What is eternal is outside of time. But everything in nature in in time. Perhaps he means that everything in nature is omnitemporal, i.e., existent at every time. But the Moon did not always exist and will not always exist.

I conclude that the Randian existence axiom does not bear up well under scrutiny. Classical theism has its own problems to which I will be returning.

(Rand below looks a little like Nancy "the Ripper" Pelosi. Both leave a lot to be desired character-wise, but Rand is sharp as a tack while Pelosi is dumb as a post.)

Defending Barry Miller against Herman Philipse: Existence as a First-Level Property, Part III

This is the third in a series.  First installment, second, Philipse's review.

Herman Philipse's strongest argument against Barry Miller's claim that existence is a a first-level property, a property of individuals, is the absurdity objection.

According to this objection, if existence is an accidental real first-order property of individual entities, so must non-existence be, but this would imply an absurdity. For in order to attribute truly a real property to a specific individual, we must be able to refer successfully to that individual by using a proper name, a pronoun, or by pointing to it, etc. However, we can refer successfully to an individual only if that individual exists or at least has existed, so that non-existence cannot be a real property. Hence existence cannot be an accidental real first-level property of individuals either.

The absurdity objection can be put like this:

a) Existence is a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals if and only if nonexistence is also a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals.

b) Non-existence cannot be a property of individuals: if an individual exists, then it cannot have the property of nonexistence. 

Therefore

c) Existence is not a property of individuals.

Miller must accept (b) since he does not countenance nonexistent items in the manner of Meinong. He agrees with Frege, Russell, and Quine that everything exists. If so, then non-existence cannot be a real property of individuals. Otherwise, there could be an individual x such that x both exists and does not exist. That would be absurd, i.e., logically contradictory.

Miller must therefore reject (a).  Now let's hear what Philipse has to say.

Miller replies to this argument [the absurdity objection] by claiming that whereas existence is a real property of individuals, non-existence is merely a Cambridge property. He proposes the following criterion for deciding whether the lack of a real property implies the presence of a real complementary property: "Lack of a real property F would bespeak the presence of a correlative real property non-F only if F and non-F were determinates of . . . one determinable property" (p. 23, quote from Miller). Since there is no determinable of which both existence and non-existence are determinates (like red and not-red may both be determinates of the determinable colour), non-existence is not a real property, but rather a Cambridge property. Hence, Miller rejects the [major] premise of the absurdity objection.

I do not think that this refutation is convincing. Why endorse Miller's criterion? A person could just as well propose a similar criterion for deciding whether we are talking about real properties: all real properties are either determinates of determinables, or determinables of determinates. Since this is not the case for existence, existence cannot be a real property. Furthermore, non-existence cannot be a Cambridge property, contrary to what Miller claims. He defined a Cambridge property as a property the presence or absence of which does not make a real difference to the individual that has it. Is it true, or is it even meaningful to say, that it makes no real difference to the goddess Athena whether she has the property of non-existence or not? Moreover, whereas all Cambridge properties are relational (p. 29), non-existence is not relational.

Philipse makes three counter-arguments in the second of the quoted paragraphs.   

The second is question-begging and is easily dismissed. Miller rejects such Meinongian objects as the goddess Athena. So no question can arise with respect to it as to whether or not it has the property of non-existence.  

The third counter-argument is this: All Cambridge properties are relational; non-existence is not relational; ergo, non-existence is not a Cambridge property.  This begs the question at the major premise. If Miller is right, not all Cambridge properties are relational: non-existence is a Cambridge property that is not relational.

The first-counter-argument is also question-begging. The argument is:  "all real [non-Cambridge] properties are either determinates of determinables, or determinables of determinates"; existence is not  a determinate of a determinable, etc; ergo, existence is not a real property.  Miller will simply run this argument in reverse: because existence is a real property, the major premise is false.

What we have here is (at least) a standoff.  Philipse has failed to refute Miller. Can Miller refute Philipse?  Perhaps not. If so, then we have a standoff. Miller's view is a contender. It is at least as good as the Fregean and Meinongian views. But all three views are open to objections. 

Defending Barry Miller against Herman Philipse: Existence as a First-Level Property, Part II

This is the second in a series. Here is the first installment. Read it for context and references. We are still examining only the first premise of Barry Miller's cosmological argument, as sketched by Philipse:

1) Existence is a real first-level accidental property of contingent individuals.

Philipse gave two arguments contra. In my first entry I refuted the weaker of the two. Philipse argued that Kant in 1781 had already put paid to the proposition that existence is a "real predicate," i.e., a real property of individuals.  I showed that Philipse confuses two different senses of 'real.'  When the Sage of Koenigsberg tells us that Offenbar, Sein ist kein reales Praedikat, he is telling us that it is obvious that being or existence is not a first-level quidditative determination.  This is true, whether or not it is obvious.  But when Miller tells us that existence is a real property of individuals, he is telling us that it is a non-Cambridge property of individuals.  Philipse confuses 'real' in the sense of 'quidditative' with 'real' in the sense of 'non-Cambridge,' and on the basis of this confusion takes Kant to have refuted Miller.  The ineptitude of Philipse's 'argument' takes the breath away.

The other argument Philipse gives is not so easily blown out of the water, if it can be so blown at all. He writes:

It is not necessary to discuss here all the attempted refutations Miller puts forward, for the simple reason that if he fails to refute convincingly only one plausible argument to the effect that existence is not a real predicate, his negative strategy is shipwrecked.

Let me take the so-called absurdity objection as an example (pp. 21-23). According to this objection, if existence is an accidental real first-order property of individual entities, so must non-existence be, but this would imply an absurdity. For in order to attribute truly a real property to a specific individual, we must be able to refer successfully to that individual by using a proper name, a pronoun, or by pointing to it, etc. However, we can refer successfully to an individual only if that individual exists or at least has existed, so that non-existence cannot be a real property. Hence existence cannot be an accidental real first-level property of individuals either.

The absurdity objection can be put like this:

a) Existence is a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals if and only if nonexistence is also a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals.

b) Non-existence cannot be a property of individuals: if an individual exists, then it cannot have the property of nonexistence. 

Therefore

c) Existence is not a property of individuals.

This is an argument that cannot be dismissed as resting on an elementary confusion. But let's take a step back and formulate the problem as an aporetic triad or antilogism the better to reconnoiter the conceptual terrain.

a) Existence is a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals if and only if nonexistence is also a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals.

b) Non-existence cannot be a property of individuals: if an individual exists, then it cannot have the property of nonexistence. 

c*) Existence is a property of individuals.

Each of these three propositions is individually plausible. And yet they cannot all be true on pain of logical contradiction. Individually plausible, but collectively inconsistent. So, if we adhere to the law of non-contradiction,  one of the propositions must be rejected.  Which will it be?

A. The Fregean will reject (c*).  A Fregean or Fressellian for present purposes is someone who, first, holds that 'exist(s)' is univocal in sense and second, has only one admissible sense: as a second-level predicate.  Thus the general existential 'Cats exist' is logically kosher because it can be read as predicating of the first-level property of being a cat the second-level property of being instantiated.  But the singular existential 'Max exists' is not logically kosher and is indeed meaningless in roughly the way 'Max is numerous' is meaningless.  For if 'exists' is univocal and means 'is instantiated,' then one cannot meaningfully say of Max that he exists for the simple reason that it is meaningless to say of an individual that it is instantiated.  Max could conceivably have an indiscernible twin, but that would not be an instance of him. By definition, the only instantiable items are properties, concepts, and the like.  Some will say that the Fregean analysis can be made to work for singular existentials if there are such haecceity properties as identity-with-Max, 'Maxity' to give it a name.   Suppose that there are.  Then 'Max exists' is analyzable as 'Maxity is instantiated.'  But this does not alter the fact that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, and existence a second-level property.

B. The Meinongian will reject (b).  A Meinongian for present purposes is someone who denies that everything exists, and holds instead that some items exist and some do not.  For the Meinongian, existence is a classificatory principle: it partitions a logically prior domain of items into those that exist and those that do not.  For the Meinongian, both existence and non-existence are first-level properties. Existence cannot be classificatory for the Fregean because, for the Fregean, everything exists.  And so for the Fregean, there cannot be a property of non-existence.

C. The Millerian -- to give him a name -- rejects (a).  A Millerian for present purposes is one who holds, against the Meinongian, that there are no nonexistent items, and against the Fregean that existence is a genuine, non-relational  property predicable of individuals.  Holding that everything exists, the Millerian cannot admit that non-existence is a real (i.e., non-Cambridge) property of individuals.  

In Part III of this series, I will examine Philipse's atempted rebuttal of Miller's rejection of (a).  For now I will merely point out that the Meinongian and Fregean positions are open to powerful objections and therefore cannot be used to refute the Millerian view.  They merely oppose it. To oppose a theory T with a questionable theory T* is not to refute T.  'Refute' is a verb of success. To refute a theory is to prove that it is untenable. Note also that the Fregean and the Meinongian are at profound loggerheads, which fact undermines both positions. After all, deep thinkers have supported each.  

My point, then, is that Philipse hasn't refuted Miller; he has merely opposed him from the point of view of the Fregean theory which is fraught with difficulties.  One cannot refute a theory with a theory that is itself open to powerful objections as the Fregean theory is.

Van Inwagen contra Meinong on Having Being and Lacking Being

There is a passage in Peter van Inwagen's "Existence, Ontological Commitment, and Fictional Entities," (in Existence: Essays in Ontology, CUP, 2014, p. 98, emphasis added), in which he expresses his incomprehension of what the Meinongian means by 'has being' and 'lacks being': 

. . . the Meinongian must mean something different by 'has being' and 'lacks being' from what I mean by these phrases. But what does he mean by them? I do not know. I say 'x has being' means '~(y) ~y = x'; the Meinongian denies this. Apparently, he takes 'has being' to be a primitive, an indefinable term, whereas I think that 'has being' can be defined in terms of  'all' and 'not'. (And I take definability in terms of 'all' and 'not' to be important, because I am sure that the Meinongian means exactly what I do by 'all' and 'not' -- and thus he understands what I mean by 'has being' and is therefore an authority on the question whether he and I mean the same.) And there the matter must rest.  The Meinongian believes that 'has being' has a meaning that cannot be explained in terms of unrestricted universal quantification and negation. 

Before I begin, let me say that I don't think van Inwagen is on this occasion feigning incomprehension as some philosophers are wont to do: I believe he really has no idea what 'has being' and cognate expressions could mean if they don't mean what he thinks they mean.

No one articulates and defends the thin theory of existence/being better than Peter van Inwagen who is arguably  'king' of the thin theorists.  The essence of the thin theory is that

1. x exists =_df ~(y)~(y=x).

Driving the tilde though the right-hand expression, left to right, yields the logically equivalent

1*. x exists =_df (∃y)(y = x)

which may be easier for you to wrap your head around.  In something closer to  English

1**.  x exists =_df x is identical to something.

The thin theory is 'thin' because it reduces existence to a purely logical notion definable in terms of the purely logical notions of unrestricted universal quantification, negation, and identity.  What is existence?  On the thin theory existence is just identity-with-something.  (Not some one thing, of course, but something or other.) Characteristically Meinongian, however, is the thesis of Aussersein which could be put as follows:

M. Some items have no being.

Now suppose two things that van Inwagen supposes.  Suppose that (i) there is exactly one sense of 'exists'/'is' and that (ii) this one sense is supplied in its entirety by (1) and its equivalents.  Then (M) in conjunction with the two suppositions entails

C. Some items are not identical to anything.

But (C) is self-contradictory since it implies that some item is such that it is not identical to itself, i.e. '(∃x)~(x = x).'

Here we have the reason for van Inwagen's sincere incomprehension of what the Meinongian means by 'has being.'  He cannot understand it because it seems to him to be self-contradictory.  But it is important to note that (M) by itself is not logically contradictory.  It is contradictory only in conjunction with van Inwagen's conviction that 'x has being' means '~(y) ~(y = x).'

In other words, if you ASSUME the thin theory, then the characteristic Meinongian thesis (M) issues in a logical contradiction. But why assume the thin theory?  Are we rationally obliged to accept it?

I don't accept the thin theory, but I am not a Meinongian either. (Barry Miller is another who is neither a thin theorist nor a Meinongian.)  'Thin or Meinongian' is a false alternative by my lights.  I am not a Meinongian because I do not believe that existence is a classificatory principle that partitions a logically prior domain of ontologically neutral items into the existing items and the nonexisting items.  I hold that everything exists, which, by obversion, implies that nothing does not exist.  So I reject (M).

I reject the thin theory not because some things don't exist, but because there is more to the existence of what exists than identity-with-something.  And what more is that?  To put it bluntly: the more is the sheer extra-logical and extra-linguistic existence of the thing, its being there (in a non-locative sense of course).  The 'more' is its not being nothing. (If you protest that to not be nothing is just to be something, where 'something' is just a bit of logical syntax, then I will explain that there are two senses of 'nothing' that need distinguishing.)  Things exist, and they exist beyond language and logic. 

Can I argue for this?  It is not clear that one needs to argue the point since it is, to me at least, self-evident.  But I can argue for it anyway.

If for x to exist is (identically) for x to be identical to some y, this leaves open the question:  does y exist or not?  You will say that y exists.  (If you say that y does not exist, then you break the link between existence and identity-with-something.)  So you say that y exists.  But then your thin theory amounts to saying that the existence of x reduces to its identity with something that exists.  My response will be that you have moved in an explanatory circle, one whose diameter is embarrassingly short.  Your task was to explain what it is for something to exist, and you answer by saying that to exist is to be identical to something that exists.  This response is no good, however, since it leaves unexplained what it is for something to exist!  You have helped yourself to the very thing you need to explain.

It is the extra-logical and extra-linguistic existence of things that grounds our ability to quantify over them.  Given that things exist, and that everything exists, we have no need for an existence predicate: we can rid ourselves of the existence predicate 'E' by defining 'E' in terms of '(∃y)(y = x).'  But note that the definiens contains nothing but logical syntax.  What this means is that one is presupposing the extra-logical existence of items in the domain of quantification.  You can rid yourself of the existence predicate if you like, but you cannot thereby rid yourself of the first-level existence of the items over which you are quantifying.

Here is another way of seeing the point.  Bertrand Russell held that existence is a propositional function's being sometimes true.  Let the propositional function be (what is expressed by) 'x is a dog.'  That function is sometimes true (in Russell's idiosyncratic phraseology) if the  free variable 'x' has a substituend that turns the propositional function or open sentence into a true closed sentence.  So consider 'Fido,' the name of an existing dog and 'Cerberus.'  How do I know that substituting  'Fido' for 'x' results in a true sentence while substituting 'Cerberus' does not? Obviously, I  must have recourse to a more fundamental notion of existence than the one that Russell defines.  I must know that Fido exists while Cerberus does not.  Clearly, existence in the fundamental sense is the existence that belongs to individuals, and not existence as a propositional function's being sometimes true.

Now if you understand the above, then you will be able to understand why, in van Inwagen's words, "The Meinongian believes that 'has being' has a meaning that cannot be explained in terms of unrestricted universal quantification and negation."  The thin theory entails that there is no difference in reality between x and existing x.  But for Meinong there is a difference: it is the difference between Sosein and Sein.  While I don't think that there can be a Sosein that floats free of Sein. I maintain that there is a distinction in reality between a thing (nature, essence, Sosein, suchness) and existence.  

If van Inwagen thinks that he has shown that Meinong's doctrine entails a formal-logical contradiction, he is fooling himself.  Despite his fancy footwork and technical rigmarole, all van Inwagen succeeds in doing is begging the question against Meinong.        

Defending Barry Miller Against Herman Philipse, Part I: Existence as a First-Level Property

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.

Do You Disappear When You Die? Comments on Yourgrau

Here, by Palle Yourgrau. Comments by BV in blue.  HT: Vlastimil Vohanka.

Many philosophers seem to think you simply 'disappear' when you die, 'erased' from the framework of reality as one would rub out a drawing on the blackboard. I think it would be a serious mistake to think this way. Time maga­zine had it right when it represented the death of bin Laden, hence his 'nonexistence,' with a picture of him on the cover, crossed out with a big X. If you’re lecturing on the capture and killing of bin Laden, you might draw a picture of him on the blackboard, and then conclude your lecture by drawing, as Time did, a big X across that drawing. That would be the right thing to do. The wrong thing to do would be to simply erase the drawing, to rub it out. A blank blackboard does not represent the death of bin Laden. On the contrary, it represents nothing. Bin Laden, on dying, did not become nothing, just as he did not come from nothing. (Ex nihilo, nihil fit.)

Let us assume that a (human) person is just an animated human body and that there is no Platonic soul or Cartesian res cogitans or anything relevantly similar of an immaterial nature that continues to exist after bodily death.  Let us assume that at death all of a person's mental and spiritual functions cease. The issue is whether a person, upon dying, becomes nothing. To make the question totally clear, assume that the person's corpse has been fully cremated. Is a person after death and cremation nothing at all? I am with Yourgrau part of the way: Bin Laden is not now nothing. One simple consideration is this: bin Laden is an object of veridical memories and the subject of many true propositions.  So he can't be nothing.  The wholly past is actual, not merely possible; factual, not fictional; real, not imaginary. Those are datanic claims, it seems to me, or very near datanic. They lay claim to being Moorean facts beyond reasonable dispute.

If presentism in the philosophy of time is the claim that all and only temporally present items exist, then presentism is false. The dead rise up to mock those who would restrict the ontological inventory to what exists at present.  At Halloween and at every season.

What about Yourgrau's claim that bin Laden did not come from nothing?  That is true if all it means is that prior to his conception there were two gametes that had to join to produce his zygotic self. In simpler terms, bin Laden did not come from nothing because he had material causes and they were not nothing. (Nor was the copulation of his parents nothing.)  But it is false if it means that, prior to bin Laden's conception, that very individual, bin Laden, was something real, and not nothing. 

The following temporal asymmetry strongly recommends itself: what no longer exists is not nothing; but what does not yet exist is nothing. It seems quite clear that we do refer successfully to wholly past individuals and events such as bin Laden and his being killed.  It is rather less clear how anyone, including God, could refer to bin Laden, that very individual qua individual, before his conception.  See A Most Remarkable Prophecy for some reasons.

But let's not worry at the moment about future individuals, if any; let's focus on past individuals, and, in particular, the human dead, about whom we all  have a lively interest.

Just this, however, seems to have escaped many, if not most philosophers who’ve written about the metaphysics of death. Shelly Kagan, for example, writes in his popular study Death that “nonexistence is nonexistence. It’s no kind of con­dition or state that I am in at all [after I’ve died]." Kagan seems to believe that when you’ve died and ceased to exist, there’s “no one left” to be in any sort of state or con­dition. There’s no one left even to be in the state of nonex­istence, to have the property of nonexistence. He seems to subscribe to W.V. Quine’s doctrine that “in our common- sense usage of ‘exist’, that [bin Laden] doesn’t exist, means simply that there is no such entity at all.” If there’s no such entity, ob­viously, there’s no such entity to occupy the state of nonexist­ence, to have the property of nonexistence.

As I said, this is a widely held view among philosophers of death. To choose another prominent example, consider what Francis Kamm writes in Morality, Mortality: “Life can sometimes be worse for a person than the alternative of nonexistence, even though nonexistence is not a better state of being.” For Kamm, nonexistence is never a better state of being than is exist­ence because for her, apparently, nonexistence is not a state of being at all.

Kamm and Kagan, however, are mistaken. What they say is true not of Socrates but of the tooth fairy. The tooth fairy is indeed not in a state of nonexistence for the simple reason that there is no such person as the tooth fairy. By con­trast, there is such a person as Socrates. Nathan Salmon, in “What Is Existence?” puts the matter succinctly: “‘Kripke exists’ is true whereas ‘Napoleon exists’ is false. Kripke has existence. Napoleon has nonexistence.”

When you die and cease to exist, you aren’t 'erased', you aren’t 'rubbed out', nor do you turn into a different kind of being. You forfeit your existence, not your essence. Death affects that you are, not what you are. Thus, assuming, for the sake of argument, that persons are concrete objects and that that is part of their essence, when Socrates died he didn’t cease being concrete. He went from being an existent concrete object to being a nonexistent concrete object. And the same is true, analogously, of an inorganic concrete ob­ject like a rock. This will no doubt sound paradoxical (not to say, downright crazy) to many people. Surely, what’s not there can’t be concrete! After all, if something’s concrete, you can trip over it in the dark, whereas there’s no need to worry about tripping over the nonexistent. True enough, if we’re speaking about an actual, an existent concrete object. But here we’re speaking of concrete objects that have ceased to exist— i.e. that have lost their existence, but not their es­sence. (Indeed, what would it mean for something to lose its essence? What would make it that very thing that had lost it?

The moral, then, is this: Concreteness should not be con­fused with actuality.

What Yourgrau is proposing is a Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian theory of wholly past individuals such as Socrates.  Socrates, unlike the Tooth Fairy, is real, not imaginary or fictional or mythical. But Socrates does not exist.  His present nonexistence, though, does not entail his being nothing at all. He is something: a nonexistent essence. Yourgrau, by contrast is an existent essence. But Yourgrau too will die, and when he does, he will become a nonexistent essence and join the company of Socrates and all the other concrete nonexistent individual essences.  To get a sense of what is meant by 'individual essence' here, consider any concrete thing that exists such as the table in front of you and 'peel away' (in thought) its existence.  'Peel away' the thing's Dasein.  What's left over is the thing's quiddity or whatness or Sosein or individual essence.  But don't confuse this individual essence with an abstract property such as a Plantingian haecceity. It is not a property of the thing, but the thing itself 'minus' its existence. And it is not abstract, but concrete.  The distinction between (individual) essence and existence, while made by the mind, has a foundation in things, a basis in reality.  We are in the vicinity of the distinctio realis of the Thomists.  But as I read Yourgrau, he is pushing further in a Meinongian direction.  If I understand Thomas, an essence cannot be without existence; what Yourgrau is envisaging, however, are individual essences that are without existence. This is tantamount to Meinong's Independence of Sosein from Sein.

So you've got your existent essences and your nonexistent essences.  When you die, you don't disappear or cease to be; you remain as a nonexistent essence.  You don't remain in existence as a nonexistent essence; that would be contradictory. So what Yourgrau might be saying is that you remain in being as a nonexistent essence.  Accordingly, essences ARE but only some of them EXIST. Indications are that Yourgrau holds that existent essences are all and only the temporally present ones. That would make him a kind of presentist.  He would avoid my anti-presentist objection above by saying that, while the dead do not exist, they are.  Or he could go full Meinongian and say that a dead person is an essence or Sosein that has no Sein whatsoever.  This is Meinong's famous doctrine of Aussersein according to which nonexistent objects are jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein. Accordingly, when I remember my dead mother and say things about her, she is the beingless object of my veridical memories and the beingless subject of my statements. 

Here is one place where I would insert the blade of critique. It is difficult to understand how there could be items that have no being whatsoever but are yet mind-independent.  My dead mother is irremovably resident in the past no matter what anyone says or thinks about her, and whether anyone thinks about her at all.Her fate, and yours too, dear reader, will be to enter oblivion, and sooner than you think. But to be forever and wholly forgotten is not to be nothing. She will forever be something. But how can anything be something if it has no being at all?

But Yourgrau needn't go all the way with Meinong. He could say that the dead, while they they do not exist, yet ARE.

A difference between me and Yourgrau is that I would say that the dead (and all wholly past items) are actual, not merely possible. Yourgrau does not say this since for him, to exist is to be actual.  But then what is the modal status of the dead? Here the critical blade comes out again. 

If, when a thing ceases to exist, it ceases to be actual, what modal status does it acquire? 'Actual' is a modal word; it is a member of the (alethic) modal family including 'possible,' 'merely possible,' 'impossible,' 'necessary,' 'contingent,' and 'noncontingent.'  So when Socrates ceased to exist,  did he become merely possible? No. Past individuals are not merely possible individuals. They actually were. 

Since Yourgrau accepts concrete individual essences, he might say the following. Before Socrates was conceived, he WAS as a merely possible individual, an essence without existence.  When he came into existence, he became actual: his essence was actualized. When he ceased to exist, he ceased to be actual and became -- what? An impossible individual essence? (If nothing can have two beginnings of existence, and our man has had one, then it is impossible that he exist and be actual again.)  There are nasty questions here.  For example, how can the modal status of an item change over time?  More later. It's Saturday night. Time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and tune in Judge Jeannine.

This difficulty of speaking coherently of the dead is by no means confined to philosophers of death, nor, indeed, to philosophers of any stripe. It’s especially noticeable in book dedications, where authors simply cannot bring themselves to refer to the dead, themselves, substituting instead refer­ence to the memory of the dead. When you think about it, however, this is absurd. Unlike the dead, our memories of the dead are alive and well, and in any case, are a poor substitute for the loved ones being honored in the dedications. It’s your mother who taught you to love music, not your memories of your mother, your father who first took you to a poetry reading, not your memories of your father, and so on. What could be more different from a dead parent than a living memory? The nonexistence of the dead should make us more attuned to what’s real, not less. For the dead relative is every bit as real as, though less existent than, the living memory. “Never . . . think of a thing or being we love but have not actually before our eyes,” Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, “without reflecting that perhaps this thing has been destroyed, or this person is dead. May our sense of reality not be dissolved by this thought but made more intense. . . . Love needs reality”

This is an extract from the book 'Death and Nonexistence' by Palle Yourgrau (Oxford University Press, August 2019).

Yourgrau makes some excellent and true points here.  The dead are real.  When I remember my dead mother I remember her, not my memory of her.  But his Meinongian or quasi-Meinongian theory raises some difficult questions.  

"Only the Present Exists"

The above title gives the gist of presentism in the philosophy of time. It is an answer to Quine's ontological inventory question: What is there?  What, by category, should we count as existent?  The presentist answer is that only (temporally) present items exist: wholly past and wholly future items do not exist.  Among these items are times, events, processes, individual substances, property-instantiations.  

'Only the present exists' is doubly ambiguous. 

FIRST AMBIGUITY

It is first of all ambiguous as between a tautology and a substantive thesis. It depends on how one construes 'exists.'  Is it present-tensed?  Then we get a tautology:

TAUT:  Only the present exists at present.

Presentists, however, are not in the business of retailing tautologies. They are out to advance a substantive and therefore non-tautological claim about what exists.  But to do this, their characteristic thesis cannot sport a present-tensed use of 'exists.'  So they have to say something like this:

SUBS: Only the present exists simpliciter.

But what does 'simpliciter' mean?  One might take it to mean 'tenseless.' Thus

SUBS*: Only the present exists tenselessly.

That is not a tautology. One might reasonably object that (SUBS*) is false on the ground that there are (tenselessly) wholly past and wholly future items such as Julius Caesar, his assassination, and my death.  That is what the so-called 'eternalists' maintain: 

E: Past, present, and future items all exist tenselessly.

All existents are on a par in point of existence. All are equally real.  Boethius exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as I do.  It is just that he exists in the past.  Now most eternalists are B-theorists.  They accept the B-theory of time. And so they would say that 'past,' 'present,' and 'future' can and must be cashed out relationally in terms of the B-relations: earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  Boethius exists in the past in that he tenselessly exists at times earlier than some reference time such as the time of my writing this sentence.  He exists just as I do, but elsewhen.  London is elsewhere relative to here, where I flourish, but is no less real than where I flourish.  Gloomier, no doubt, but no less real.

The main thing for 'present' purposes is that presentism and eternalism are both substantive claims. Neither is a tautology and neither is a contradiction.  Note also that if 'exists' in 'Past, present, and future items all exist' is read present-tensedly, then the sentence just mentioned would be a contradiction. We also note that to formulate either presentism or eternalism we must invoke a tenseless sense of 'exists.' 

SECOND AMBIGUITY

Now we notice that 'Only the present exists' is also ambiguous as between

SPM: Only this present exists: there is (tenselessly) exactly one time, the present, at which everything (tenselessly) exists.

and 

PP:  Only the present present exists: there are (tenselessly) many times, and every time t is such that everything that exists exists (tenselessly) at t.

The first view is Solipsism of the Present Moment.  This is a lunatic view, although it seems logically possible. It amounts to saying that everything that ever existed and everything that ever will exist exists now. Imagine that the entire universe, together with fossils, monuments, memories, and dusty books just now sprang into existence, lasts a while, and then collapses into non-being.

Presentism as usually understood affirms something like (PP), which implies that there are past presents, a present present, and future presents.  The idea is that, at any given time, whether past, present, or future, all that exists is what exists at that time. If reality is the totality of what exists, (PP) implies that reality is always changing. (PP) implies that reality is 'dynamic' whereas (E) implies that it is static.

(PP) strikes me as problematic. (PP) implies that there are (tenselessly) many different times. But there cannot be (tenselessly) many times if at each time there is only what exists at that time. For if at each time there is only what exists at that time, then at each time there are no times other than that time.  Is there a formulation of presentism that is consistent with its own truth?  I suspect that there isn't.

Presentism is at present very popular among philosophers.  I am wondering why.  Some distinguished writers actually say that it is common sense. What?  The proverbial man on the street has no opinion on any of these questions.

Feser on Vallicella on Feser on the Truth-Maker Objection to Presentism

I argued in my first critical installment that Edward Feser in his stimulating new book, Aristotle's Revenge, does not appreciate the force of the truth-maker objection to presentism in the philosophy of time. Ed's response to me is here. I thank Ed for his response. Herewith, my counter-response.

So, as I say, I don’t think the “truthmaker objection” is very impressive or interesting.  Bill disagrees.  He asks us to consider the following propositions:

(1) There are contingent past-tensed truths.

(2) Past-tensed truths are true at present.

(3) Truth-Maker Principle: contingent truths need truth-makers.

(4) Presentism: Only (temporally) present items exist.

The problem, Bill says, is that “the limbs of this aporetic tetrad, although individually plausible, appear to be collectively inconsistent.”

But I would deny that there is any inconsistency.  There is a presently existing fact that serves as the truthmaker for past-tensed truths such as the truth that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March – namely, the fact that Caesar really was assassinated on the Ides of March.  To be sure, Caesar no longer exists and his assassination is no longer taking place.  But the fact that he was assassinated on the Ides of March still exists.  

I take it that Ed accepts all four of the above propositions as stated. So far, agreement. We also agree that 'Julius Caesar was assassinated' is past-tensed, true, presently true, contingently true, needs a truth-maker, and has a truth-maker. But whereas I take the fearsome foursome to be collectively logically inconsistent, in that any three of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining proposition,  Ed finds no logical inconsistency whatsoever. Hence he finds the truth-maker objection to presentism to be neither impressive nor interesting.

The nub of the disagreement is precisely this: Ed thinks that the fact that Caesar was assassinated suffices as truth-maker for 'Caesar was assassinated' even if presentism is true. That is precisely what I deny. If by 'fact that,' Ed means 'true proposition that,' then I say that Ed is confusing a truth-bearer with a truth-maker.  But I hesitate to tax him with such an elementary blunder. So I will take him to be saying that the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' is the fact of Caesar's having been assassinated.  This is a concrete state of affairs, the subject constituent of which is Caesar himself. This state of affairs cannot exist unless Caesar himself exists.  Now Feser grants the obvious point that Caesar no longer exists.  That is is a datum that no reasonable person can deny. It follows that the truth-making state of affairs no longer exists either. 

On presentism, however, what no longer exists does not exist at all.  Presentism is not the tautological thesis that only the present exists at present.  Everybody agrees about that. So-called 'eternalists' in the philosophy of time will cheerfully admit that only present items exist at present. But they will go on to say that wholly past and wholly future items exist as well, and just as robustly as present items. It is just that they exist elsewhen, analogously as Los Angeles, although elsewhere relative to Phoenix, exists just as robustly (or as anemically) as Phoenix.

It is important to be clear about this. Presentism is a hard-core, substantive,  metaphysical thesis, in the same metaphysical boat with the various anti-presentisms, e.g, the misnamed 'eternalism.'   Presentism is not logically true or trivially true; it is not common sense, nor is it 'fallout' from ordinary language.  Speaking with the vulgar I say things like, 'The Berlin Wall no longer exists.' I am using ordinary English to record a well-known historical fact. Saying this, however, I do not thereby commit myself to the controversial metaphysical claim that wholly past items are nothing at all and that present items alone exist, are real, or have being. The Berlin sentence and its innumerable colleagues are neutral with respect to the issues that divide presentists and eternalists.

Presentism is the controversial metaphysical claim that only the (temporally) present exists, period. Or at least that is the gist of it, pending various definitional refinements. On presentism, then, Caesar does not exist at all. If so, there is nothing to ground the truth that Caesar was assassinated. We don't even need to bring in truth-making facts or states of affairs.  It suffices to observe that, on presentism, wholly past individuals such as Caesar do not exist.  One should now be able to see that the grounding problem represented by (1)-(4) is up and running.  

It is a datum that 'Caesar was assassinated' (or the proposition expressed by an assertive utterance of the sentence) is a contingent, past-tensed truth. It is also a datum that this truth is true now.  Now my datum might be your theory. But since Feser will grant both of these datanic points, I need say nothing more here in their defense. Given the datanic points, and given that the problem is soluble, one must either accept the truth-maker principle and reject presentism, or accept presentism and reject the truth-maker principle. And this is what most philosophers of time do. Trenton Merricks, for example, does the latter. (Truth and Ontology, Oxford, 2007)  Back to Feser:

To get an inconsistency, Bill would have to add to the list some further claim like:

(5) Only facts about what does exist (as opposed to facts about what used to exist) can serve as truthmakers.

But that would simply beg the question against the presentist.  And of course the presentist would say: “There will be no inconsistency if you get rid of (5).  ‘Problem’ solved!”

Not at all. There is no need to add a proposition to the tetrad to generate inconsistency. It is of course understood by almost all truth-maker theorists that only existing truth-makers can do the truth-making job.  There are few if any Meinongian truth-maker theorists.  Few if any will maintain, for example, that 'There are golden mountains' is made true by Meinong's nonexistent golden mountain. That being well-understood, it must also be understood that truth-maker theorists do not hold that only presently existing items can serve as truth-makers.  They don't build presentism into truth-maker theory. What they hold is that some, if not all, truths need (existing) truth makers.  Truth-maker theory is neutral on the question that divides presentists from eternalists. Now the past-tensed  'Caesar existed' is true.  It cannot just be true: there must be something 'in the world,' something external to the sentential representation, that grounds its truth. But what might that be on presentism?  If only present items exist, then Caesar does not exist. And if Caesar does not exist, then there is nothing that could serve as the truth-maker of 'Caesar existed.'

One ought to conclude that the quartet of propositions supra is collectively inconsistent. If the tetrad is not a full-on aporia, an insolubilium, then either one must reject presentism or one must reject the truth-maker principle.

The Temporal Neutrality of Truth-Maker Theory and Whether I Beg the Question

I do not assume that only presently existing items can serve as truth-makers.  What I assume is that only existing items can serve as truth-makers.  To appreciate this, consider timeless entities.  God, classically conceived, is an example: he is not omnitemporal, but eternal. He doesn't exist in time at every time, but 'outside of' time.  Now consider the proposition that God, so conceived, exists.  What makes it true, if true? Well, God. It follows that a truth-maker needn't be temporally present, or in time at all, to do its job.  Or consider so-called 'abstract' objects such as the number 7. It is true that 7 exists.  What makes this truth true? The number 7! So again a truth-maker needn't be temporally present, or in time at all, to serve as a truth-maker. But it must exist. 

Truth-maker theory, as such, takes no stand on either of the following two questions: Does everything that exists exist in time? Does everything that exists in time exist at the present time?

I therefore plead innocent to Ed's charge that I beg the question. Consider 'Caesar existed.' I don't assume that this past-tensed truth needs a presently existing truth-maker to be true.  I assume merely that it needs an existing truth-maker to be true. It is not that I beg the question; it is rather that Feser fails to appreciate the consequences of his own theory. He fails to appreciate that, on presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all.  It is because Caesar does not exist at all that I say that 'Caesar existed' lacks a truth-maker on presentism. It is not because he doesn't exist at present. Of course he doesn't exist at present!

Feser's Dilemma

It seems to me that Ed is uncomfortably perched on the horns of a dilemma. Either the truth-maker of a past-tensed truth is fact that or it is a fact of.  But it cannot be a fact that, for such an item is just a true proposition, and no proposition can be its own truth-maker. For example, the fact that (the true proposition that) Caesar was assassinated cannot be what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated. On the other horn, the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' can be a fact of, i.e., a concrete state of affairs, but on presentism this fact does not exist. For on presentism, Caesar, who does not now exist, does not exist at all. Hence the fact of does not exist  either, for its existence depends on the existence of its constituents, one of which is the roman emperor in question.

I suggests that Ed does not see the dilemma because he equivocates on 'fact.'  That should be clear from his talk, above, of "facts about."  He wants to say that "facts about" are truth-makers. but no truth-making fact is about it constituents. A "fact about" can only be a proposition.  It is a fact about Caesar and Brutus that the latter stabbed the former (Et tu, Brute?), But that "fact about" is just a true proposition that needs a truth-maker. The gen-u-ine truth-maker, however, is not about anything.  For example, the truth-maker of 'I am seated' is a concrete fact-of that has as one of its constituents the 200 lb sweating animal who wears my clothes. This truth-making fact is not about me; it contains me.

Michael Dummett sees the problem with presentism very clearly:

. . . the thesis that only the present is real denies any truth-value to statements about the past or the future; for, if it were correct, there would be nothing in virtue of which a statement of either type could be true or false, whereas a proposition can be true only if there is something in virtue of which it is true. We must attribute some form of reality either to the past, or to the future, or both.  (Truth and the Past, Columbia UP, 2004, p. 74.)

Feser again:

The point I was trying to make, in any event, is that past objects and events were real (unlike fictional objects and events, which never were).  That fact is what serves as the truthmaker for statements about past objects and events.  Statements about present objects and events have as their truthmakers a different sort of fact, viz. facts about objects and events that are real.  

Ed and I will agree that Caesar's assassination is an actual past event: it is not something that merely could have happened way back when but didn't, nor is it a fictional event of the sort that one finds in historical novels. Ed is committed to saying that this event was real.  But if so, then it is true now that Caesar was assassinated. What makes it true?  Feser's answer is that the fact that Caesar was assassinated is what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated.  But this is not a satisfactory answer since it merely repeats the datum. It is given that Caesar was assassinated. The problem is to explain what makes this true given the truth of presentism.

It is obvious that the true proposition that Caesar was assassinated cannot be what makes it true that Caesar was assassinated. That would be to confuse a truth-maker with a truth-bearer. The truth-maker cannot be an item in the 'representational order'; it must be something in the 'real order' of concrete spatiotemporal particulars.  The truth-maker must be either Caesar himself, battle scars and all, or a concrete state of affairs that has him as a constituent. But if presentism is true, then there is no such man. And if Caesar does not exist, then no concrete state of affairs involving him exists.  But now I am starting to repeat myself.

Bill also writes:

I conclude that Feser hasn't appreciated the depth of the grounding problem. 'Caesar was assassinated' needs an existing truth-maker. But on presentism, neither Caesar nor his being assassinated exists. It is not just that these two items don't exist now; on presentism, they don't exist at all. What then makes the past-tensed sentence true?  This is the question that Feser hasn't satisfactorily answered.

End quote.  In fact I have answered it.  Yes, “Caesar was assassinated” needs an existing truthmaker.  And that truthmaker is not Caesar or his assassination (neither of which exist anymore) but the fact that he was assassinated (which does still exist – after all, it is as much a fact now as it was yesterday, and will remain a fact tomorrow).  To this Bill objects that “obviously this won't do [because] the past-tensed truth cannot serve as [its] own truth-maker.”  But again, this conflates facts with propositions, and these should not be conflated. 

Ed's response is a very strange one. I am suggesting that Ed might be conflating truth-makers with truth-bearers, truth-making facts with propositions.  He says he is not. Fine. But since I explicitly made the distinction, he cannot reasonably accuse me of conflating truth-making facts with propositions.  In any case, it definitely seems to me that Ed is succumbing to the conflation in question, as I have explained above.

Are My Objections Sound Only if I Have a Correct Alternative Theory?

This is a fascinating metaphilosophical question. Ed again:

One further point.  Even if the defender of the “truthmaker objection” could get around the criticisms I have been raising, the objection nevertheless will succeed only if some alternative to presentism is correct.  And as I argue in Aristotle’s Revenge, none of the alternatives is correct.  So it will not suffice for the critic merely to try to raise problems for the presentist’s understanding of truth-making.  He will also have to defend some non-presentist understanding of truth-making, which will require responding to the objections I’ve raised against the rivals to presentism.

In particular, the critic presupposes that we have a clear idea of what it would be for past objects and events and future objects and events to be no less real than the present is, and thus a clear idea of what it would be for such things to be truthmakers.  But I claim that that is an illusion.  The eternalist view is in fact not well-defined.  It is a tissue of confusions that presupposes errors such as a tendency to characterize time in terms that intelligibly apply only to space, and to mistake mathematical abstractions for concrete realities.  Indeed, on the Aristotelian view of time that I defend in the book, the approaches to the subject commonly taken by various contemporary writers are in several respects wrongheaded.  Again, what I say about the truthmaker objection must be read in light of the larger discussion of time in Aristotle’s Revenge.

I deny what Feser asserts in the second sentence of the quotation immediately above. The assertion seems to trade on a confusion of possible theories and extant theories. Even if there is no tenable extant competitor to Feser's version of presentism -- which is of course only one of several different versions -- it does not follow that there is no possible tenable competitor theory.  That is one concern. Another is more radical. 

It may be that all of the extant theories in the philosophy of time are untenable and open to powerful objections. In particular, I am not an 'eternalist' and I am very sensitive to the problems it faces. To mention one, it seems that eternalism needs an understanding of tenseless existence and tenseless property-possession that I suspect is unintelligible. Could all the extant theories be false? Why not? They might all, on deep analysis, turn out be logical contraries of each other.

An even more radical thought: It may be that all possible theories (all theories that it is possible for us to formulate)  in the philosophy of time are untenable and rationally insupportable in  the end  in such a way as definitively to give the palm to one of theories over all the others.

But even apart from the two radical proposals just bruited, it is not entirely clear why, if the objections I have raised are sound, I would have to consider Feser's (putative) refutations of the other theories.  If my objections are in fact sound, then I can stop right there.  In any case, I did in installment three of my ongoing critique consider Feser's notion that the truth-makers of past-tensed truths all exist at present.  By the way, it is not clear to me how this notion (causal trace theory) is supposed to cohere with what Feser says elsewhere in his section on time. How does it cohere with what we discussed above?  It is one thing to say that the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' is the fact that C. was assassinated, and quite another to say that the truth-maker exists in the present in the form of present effects of C.'s past existence.  

Time to punch the clock!

Presentism and Existence-Entailing Relations: A Problem and Feser's Solution

The is is the second installment in my critique of Edward Feser's defense of presentism in his latest book, Aristotle's Revenge.  Here is Part I of the critique.

...........................................

It is plausibly maintained that all relations are existence-entailing. To illustrate from the dyadic case: if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.   A relation cannot hold unless the things between which or among which it holds all exist.  A weaker, and hence even more plausible, claim is that all relations are existence-symmetric: if R relates a and b, then either both relata exist or both do not exist. Both the stronger and the weaker claims rule out the possibility of a relation that relates an existent and a nonexistent. So if Cerberus is eating my cat, then Cerberus exists. And if I am thinking about Cerberus, then, given that Cerberus does not exist, my thinking does not relate me to Cerberus.  This implies that  intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, though it is, as Franz Brentano says, relation-like (ein Relativliches).

But if presentism is true, and only temporally present items exist, then no relation connects a present with a non-present item, whether a wholly past item or a wholly future one. This seems hard to accept for the following reason.

I ate lunch  an hour ago. So the event of my eating (E) is earlier than the event of my typing (T). How can it be true that E bears the earlier than relation to T, and T bears the later than relation to E, unless both E and T exist? But E is non-present. If presentism is true, then E does not exist.  It's not just that E does not exist now, which is trivially true, but that E does not exist at all. And if E does not exist at all,  then E does not stand in the earlier than relation to T which does exist, and not merely in the present-tensed sense of 'exists,' but in the sense in which E does not exist.   If, on the other hand, there are events that exist but are non-present, then presentism is false.

The principle that all genuine relations are existence-symmetric seems inconsistent with presentism.  Now which of these two principles is more reasonably believed?  I should think it is the first.

How might the presentist respond? Since E does not exist on his view, while T does, and E is earlier than T, he must either (A) deny that all relations are existence-symmetric, or (B) deny that earlier than is a relation. He must either allow the possibility of genuine relations that connect nonexistents and existents, or deny that T stands in a temporal relation to E.

To  fully savor the problem we  cast it in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. All genuine relations are either existence-entailing or existence-symmetric.

2. Earlier than is a genuine relation.

3. Presentism: only temporally present items exist.

4. Some events are earlier than others.

Each limb of the tetrad is exceedingly plausible.  But they cannot all be true:  any three, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining limb.  For example, the first three entail the negation of the fourth.  To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs.  Now (4) cannot be rejected because it is a datum.

Will you deny (1) and say that there are relations that are neither existence-entailing nor existence-symmetric?  I find this hard to swallow because of the following argument.  (a) Nothing can have properties unless it exists.  Therefore (b) nothing can have relational properties unless it exists. (c) Every relation gives rise to relational properties:  if Rab, then a has the property of standing in R to b, and b has the property of standing in R to a.  Therefore, (d) if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.

Will you deny (2) and say that earlier than is not a genuine relation?  What else could it be?

Will you deny presentism and say that that both present and non-present items exist?  Since it is obvious that present and non-present items cannot exist in the present-tense sense of 'exists,'  the suggestion has to be that present and non-present (past or future) items exist in a tenseless sense of 'exist.'  But what exactly does this mean? 'Eternalism' is also problematic and I am not endorsing it. 

The problem is genuine, but there appears to be no good solution, no solution that does not involve its own difficulties.

But if there is a solution it would have to be by rejecting presentism since it is the least credible of the four propositions above.

Feser's Response

Feser maintains that objections to presentism along the foregoing lines rest on the assumption that "for a relation to hold between two things, they both have to exist now." (301) But this is not the operative assumption. The operative assumption is simply that for an n-adic relation to hold between or among n relata, all the relata have to exist, period. They have to exist simpliciter; they don't have to exist now.  The eternalist can easily satisfy the demand by saying that events E and T exist simpliciter despite E's being earlier than T.  Whatever problems eternalism has, it has this going for it: it can explain how a past event can stand in a relation to a present event.  

It is important to bear in mind that the presentist too must make use of the notion of existence simpliciter.  The thesis of presentism is not the logical truth that whatever exists (present-tense) exists now.  It is the thesis that whatever exists simpliciter exists now.  Equivalently: only present items exist simpliciter.  From this it follows that wholly past items such as the event of my having eaten lunch do not exist simpliciter. But then the objection is up and running.

I conclude that Feser has not defused the objection to presentism from trans-temporal relations.

 

The is is the second installment in my critique of Edward Feser's defense of presentism in his latest book, Aristotle's Revenge.  Here is Part I of the critique.

...........................................

It is plausibly maintained that all relations are existence-entailing. To illustrate from the dyadic case: if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.   A relation cannot hold unless the things between which or among which it holds all exist.  A weaker, and hence even more plausible, claim is that all relations are existence-symmetric: if R relates a and b, then either both relata exist or both do not exist. Both the stronger and the weaker claims rule out the possibility of a relation that relates an existent and a nonexistent. So if Cerberus is eating my cat, then Cerberus exists. And if I am thinking about Cerberus, then, given that Cerberus does not exist, my thinking does not relate me to Cerberus.  This implies that  intentionality is not a relation, strictly speaking, though it is, as Franz Brentano says, relation-like (ein Relativliches).

But if presentism is true, and only temporally present items exist, then no relation connects a present with a non-present item, whether a wholly past item or a wholly future one. This seems hard to accept for the following reason.

I ate lunch  an hour ago. So the event of my eating (E) is earlier than the event of my typing (T). How can it be true that E bears the earlier than relation to T, and T bears the later than relation to E, unless both E and T exist? But E is non-present. If presentism is true, then E does not exist.  It's not just that E does not exist now, which is trivially true, but that E does not exist at all. And if E does not exist at all,  then E does not stand in the earlier than relation to T which does exist, and not merely in the present-tensed sense of 'exists,' but in the sense in which E does not exist.   If, on the other hand, there are events that exist but are non-present, then presentism is false.

The principle that all genuine relations are existence-symmetric seems inconsistent with presentism.  Now which of these two principles is more reasonably believed?  I should think it is the first.

How might the presentist respond? Since E does not exist on his view, while T does, and E is earlier than T, he must either (A) deny that all relations are existence-symmetric, or (B) deny that earlier than is a relation. He must either allow the possibility of genuine relations that connect nonexistents and existents, or deny that T stands in a temporal relation to E.

To  fully savor the problem we  cast it in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1. All genuine relations are either existence-entailing or existence-symmetric.

2. Earlier than is a genuine relation.

3. Presentism: only temporally present items exist.

4. Some events are earlier than others.

Each limb of the tetrad is exceedingly plausible.  But they cannot all be true:  any three, taken together, entail the negation of the remaining limb.  For example, the first three entail the negation of the fourth.  To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs.  Now (4) cannot be rejected because it is a datum.

Will you deny (1) and say that there are relations that are neither existence-entailing nor existence-symmetric?  I find this hard to swallow because of the following argument.  (a) Nothing can have properties unless it exists.  Therefore (b) nothing can have relational properties unless it exists. (c) Every relation gives rise to relational properties:  if Rab, then a has the property of standing in R to b, and b has the property of standing in R to a.  Therefore, (d) if R relates a and b, then both a and b exist.

Will you deny (2) and say that earlier than is not a genuine relation?  What else could it be?

Will you deny presentism and say that that both present and non-present items exist?  Since it is obvious that present and non-present items cannot exist in the present-tense sense of 'exists,'  the suggestion has to be that present and non-present (past or future) items exist in a tenseless sense of 'exist.'  But what exactly does this mean? 'Eternalism' is also problematic and I am not endorsing it. 

The problem is genuine, but there appears to be no good solution, no solution that does not involve its own difficulties.

But if there is a solution it would have to be by rejecting presentism since it is the least credible of the four propositions above.

Feser's Response

Feser maintains that objections to presentism along the foregoing lines rest on the assumption that "for a relation to hold between two things, they both have to exist now." (301) But this is not the operative assumption. The operative assumption is simply that for an n-adic relation to hold between or among n relata, all the relata have to exist, period. They have to exist simpliciter; they don't have to exist now.  The eternalist can easily satisfy the demand by saying that events E and T exist simpliciter despite E's being earlier than T.  Whatever problems eternalism has, it has this going for it: it can explain how a past event can stand in a relation to a present event.  

It is important to bear in mind that the presentist too must make use of the notion of existence simpliciter.  The thesis of presentism is not the logical truth that whatever exists (present-tense) exists now.  It is the thesis that whatever exists simpliciter exists now.  Equivalently: only present items exist simpliciter.  From this it follows that wholly past items such as the event of my having eaten lunch do not exist simpliciter. But then the objection is up and running.

I conclude that Feser has not defused the objection to presentism from trans-temporal relations.

 

Existence Simpliciter

Here is London Ed, recently returned from his African sojourn, raising some good questions anent my entry, A Critique of Edward Feser's Defense of Presentism, Part I:

>> the presentist idea is not adequately captured by saying that wholly past items no longer exist, since all who understand English will agree to that. The presentist idea is that wholly past items do not exist at all.

But what does ‘exist at all’ mean?

BV: That's part of the problem and part of the fun. You are not saying anything metaphysical when you say that Boston's Scollay Square no longer exists. You are simply pointing out an historical fact.  You are not committing yourself to presentism or any version of anti-presentism such as 'eternalism' (a howling misnomer if you want my opinion).  You are not 'committing metaphysics' if I may coin a phrase. Committing metaphysics, the presentist is saying that Scollay Square does not exist at all: it is NOTHING because it is wholly past.  That is surely not obvious or commonsensical or the view of the man in the street.

To see that, consider that Scollay Square is, as we speak, the intentional object of veridical memories, and the subject of true predications, e.g., 'Scollay Square attracted many a horny young sailor on shore leave.'  How then could it be NOTHING?  It seems obviously to be SOMETHING, indeed something wholly determinate and wholly actual despite being wholly past. If you say the famous square exists tenselessly at times earlier than the present time (the time simultaneous with my writing), then you uphold its existence but open yourself up to questions about what exactly tenseless existence is, questions that are as easy to formulate as they are hard (or impossible) to answer satisfactorily. Cashing out 'exists at all' in terms of 'exists tenselessly ' is the main way of explaining it. 

>> it does not exist, period

Same question. What do ‘period’ and ‘at all’ add?

BV:   'Period,' 'full stop,' 'at all,' simpliciter, sans phrase -- I am using these as stylistic variants of one another. See above response.

>> But note carefully that the second formulation is accurate only if 'exists' is not read as present-tensed, in which case the formulation is tautological, but as 'exists simpliciter,' in which case it is not.

So what does simpliciter add?

BV: See the first response.

>> What exactly it means to 'exist at all' or to 'exist 'simpliciter' is part of the problem of formulating a coherent version of presentism that can withstand close scrutiny. For present purposes we will assume that we understand well enough what these phrases mean.

Yes to the first sentence, no to the second (speaking for myself, perhaps others understand).

BV:  But surely, Ed, you understand more or less and well enough to have this discussion. Or are you feigning incomprehension? Or petering out (insider jargon that alludes to Peter van Inwagen's habit of saying that he doesn't understand something.)  I will assume that you are not feigning or petering, but doing what analytic philosophers do, namely, demanding CLARITY.  Fine. But can't you see that there is a difference between holding that the wholly past is nothing at all and holding that the wholly past is not nothing at all?  This is the great problem of the reality of the past.  My view is that it is a genuine problem, not a pseudo-problem, but that it is insoluble by us. I don't mean that one cannot give a solution to it. I mean that one cannot give a finally satisfactory solution to it.  That makes me a solubility skeptic about this problem.

>> As Feser himself says, on presentism, "there are no past events,"

OK, but there clearly were past events. I wonder if the whole problem rests on an equivocation. We read "there are no past events" as "there were no past events" which has the whiff of paradox and mystery. I caught myself in that equivocation exactly as I was reading it, followed by a double take. Well of course there are no past events, because they have passed over. But there were such things.

Of course you are well aware of that, and we have been on opposite sides of the question for many years. You feel there is some non-trivial sense in which "there are no past events" can be true. I fail to grasp that sense.

BV: You think the following are both obvious: (a) There were past events, and (b) There are no past events.   I will grant you that (a) is practically self-evident although not perfectly obvious.  Could not the universe have started up right at the beginning of the present with dusty books, etc, as Russell once suggested? Is that not a logical possibility? I can't take that seriously as a real possibility because it implies that there were no past presents -- which seems to commit us to the Solipsism of the Present Moment.  

But I disagree with you about (b).  You think (b) is obvious.  In one sense it is.  It is obvious if 'there are' is in the present tense.   For then you are saying, trivially, that there are now no (wholly) past events. But in another sense (b) is not obvious, although it might be either false or incoherent. Distinguished philosophers have maintained that there are tenselessly events that are past in the sense that they are earlier than present events, where the A-determination (McTaggart) 'present'' is cashed out B-theoretically.

Is there some non-trivial sense in which 'there are no past events' could be true?  You say that if there is such a sense, you cannot grasp it. I say that there is such a sense and that I can grasp it.  

I can grasp it because I can grasp what the (unqualified) presentist is saying. He is saying that when a temporal item such as an event loses the A-determination presentness, it becomes nothing at all. It is annihilated.  I can understand that because I can understand how it might not be annihilated. It would not be annihilated if (i) there are no irreducible A-determinations, where such a determination is irreducible if irreducible  to a B-relation, or (ii) there are irreducible A-determinations but they have no bearing on the tenseless existence of events and other temporal items.

Alles klar?

Gotta meet a man for lunch. 

Presentism: A Bit of Discussion with Dale Tuggy

The topic of presentism in the philosophy of time came up during Dale Tuggy's visit last weekend.  Dale anounced that he's a presentist.  So I pressed him a bit. I had him consider some such grammatically past-tensed truth as 'JFK was assassinated.' This sentence is contingently true and indeed contingently true at present.  Although the sentence is about a wholly past event, the sentence is now true. Using tensed language, we speak truly when we say that it IS true that Kennedy WAS assassinated.  What I have just set forth is a Chisholmian pre-analytic datum or a Moorean fact, a given that cannot be reasonably controverted.

I then brought up the need for truth-makers for at least some truths.  (I am not a truth-maker maximalist.) Consider ' I am seated' said by BV now as he sits in front of his computer. The sentence is (or expresses) a contingent truth.  Now would it be at all plausible to say that this sentence is just true?  Define a brute truth as a contingent truth that is just true, i.e., true, but not in virtue of anything external to the truth. The question is then: Is it plausible that 'I am seated' or the proposition it expresses be a brute truth?

I say that that is implausible in the extreme. There has to be something external  to the truth-bearer that plays a role in its being true and this something cannot be anyone's say-so. At a bare minimum, the subject term 'I' must refer to something extra-linguistic, and we know what that has to be: the 200 lb animal that wears my clothes.  So at a bare minimum, the sentence, to be true, must be about something, something that exists, and indeed exists extra-mentally and extra-linguistically.

Without bringing in truth-making facts or states of affairs, I have said enough to refute the notion that 'I am seated' could be a brute truth.  So far so good.

Now if 'I am seated' needs a truth-maker (in a very broad sense of the term), then presumably 'Kennedy was assassinated' does as well.  It can no more be  a brute truth than 'I am seated' could be a brute truth. 

Dale balked at this, claiming that the Kennedy sentence is a brute truth. It is easy to see his reason for saying it. The reason is presentism.

Roughly, presentism is the view that only temporally present items (times, events, individuals, property-instantiations, etc.) exist, full stop.  Whatever exists, exists now, where the first occurrence of 'exists' cannot be present-tensed -- that way lies tautology and triviality -- but must be in some sense be tenseless. 

It is not at all clear that presentism can be given a formulation that is at once both precise and coherent. What I have just said is very rough and I have papered over some nasty difficulties. But I think I have conveyed what the presentist is trying to say.  He is out to restrict the totality of what (tenselessly) exists to what presently exists.  An 'eternalist' -- the going term but a howling misnomer -- by contrast resists the restriction, holding as he does that the totality of what (tenselessly) exists includes past, present, and future items.  

Now if presentism is true, then JFK does not exist at all. It is not just that he does not exist now -- that's trivial -- but that he does not exist period. Well then, how can 'Kennedy was assassinated' be true?  There is nothing in existence to serve as truth-maker.  Neither Kennedy nor the event of  his being assassinated exist.  There is nothing for that sentence to be about. For on presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all.

The truth-maker principle and presentism come into conflict.  Tuggy's 'solution' is to deny that past-tensed truths need truth-makers and hold that they are brute truths. The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1) There are contingent past-tensed truths.

2) Past-tensed truths are true at present.

3) Truth-Maker Principle: contingent affirmative truths need existing truth-makers.

4) Presentism: Only present items exist.

The limbs of the tetrad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.  It's a nasty problem. Which proposition will you deny?

Some will deny (1) by holding that all past-tensed truths are either false or without truth-value. Good luck with that!

Some will deny (2). Also a non-starter.

Some will deny or revise (3) by maintaining that past-tensed truths are brute truths. This is Tuggy's line.  Very hard to swallow!

Some will deny (4).  This might be the best solution, but it too has its drawbacks which I can't go into now.

It may be that the problem is insoluble in the sense that, no matter which solution you offer, that solution will give rise to puzzles as bad or worse than the original puzzle.  I am tempted to say something along these lines.  But then I am aporetically inclined.

But for now my purpose is merely to induce in Tuggy some skepticism about presentism.   One ought to be skeptical of it since it conflicts with the truth-maker principle which in my minimalist formulation is exceedingly plausible, more plausible, I would say, than presentism, about which there are serious doubts that it is susceptible of a coherent formulation.

And please note that if one rejects presentism one is not thereby forced to embrace eternalism. While they cannot both be true, they can both be false.