Abstract
Our question about the nature of existence is actually two questions. First, what is it for a contingent individual to exist? Second, what is existence itself? But the questions are closely intertwined, and so may be posed indifferently in the form, what is existence? Our treatment divides into two halves, one critical, the other constructive. The critical chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 of this book tread the via negativa: they attempt to show what existence is not. They issue in the following aporetic tetrad:
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a.
Existence is not a property or property-instance of individuals.
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b.
Existence is not identical to individuals.
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c.
Existence is not a property of properties or cognate items.
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d.
Existence is not a property of worlds or domains.
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Notes
W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969 ), p. 94
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), p. 35: “Ontologie ist nur als Phaenomenologie moeglich.” For my critique of Heidegger see the following articles. “Heidegger and the Problem of Being,” International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. XXX, no. 2 (June 1990), pp. 245–254; Critical Review of Heidegger’s Basic Problems of Phenomenology, International Studies in Philosophy vol. XVIII, no. 1 (1986), pp. 80–81; “Heidegger’s Reduction of Being to Truth,” The New Scholasticism, vol. LIX, no. 2 (Spring 1985), pp. 156–176; “Kant, Heidegger and the Problem of the Thing In Itself,” International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 1 (March 1983), pp. 35–43; “The Problem of Being in the Early Heidegger, The Thomist, vol. 45, no. 3 (July 1981), pp. 388–406.
Cf. Heidegger, op. cit., pp. 183, 207, 212, 230, 316.
Panayot Butchvarov, Skepticism about the External World(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 122 ff.
Butchvarov, op. cit., p. 134.
At Al 1–12 of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains that `transcendental’ as he uses the term pertains not to objects, “but to our a priori concepts of objects.”
Butchvarov, op. cit., p. 125.
Hector-Neri Castaneda, “Thinking and the Structure of the World,” Critica IV (1972), p. 55.
Quentin Gibson, The Existence Principle (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998).
Ibid., p. 1.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 5–8.
Ibid., p. 1.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid.
Ibid.
This ambiguity is explained in my articles cited above.
Ibid., p. 146.
Ibid., p. 150.
Ibid., p. 151.
Donald C. Williams, “Dispensing with Existence,” The Journal of Philosophy vol. LIX (1962), p. 761.
Cf. Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World, ed. James E. Tomberlin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983).
W. V. Quine, op. cit., p. 97.
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Vallicella, W.F. (2002). The Idea of a Paradigm Theory of Existence. In: A Paradigm Theory of Existence. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 89. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0588-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0588-2_1
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