Steven Nemes, who may prove to be my nemesis, e-mails:
I'm enjoying your book so far. I'm starting the constructive half of it now, and am going to reread the chapter "The Ground of the Contingent Existent" after a quick skim over it recently. I don't want to sound arrogant or anything, but upon hearing some of the theories of existence you cover in the book, the thought in my head is "Man, this obviously can't be right. How could anyone think this?" But the philosophers in question are much smarter than me, so maybe my surprise at their theories is improper.
I have a question now regarding possible worlds, what is true-in-W, etc.
You make the point in your book that it is the fact that my existence is contingent that makes it true in some worlds that I exist and false in others. And it is the necessary existence of the Paradigm that would make it true in every possible world that he exists, rather than vice versa. This all seems very correct to me, but I am wondering about its consequences.
As I recall, my thought was along the following lines. The biconditionals
N. x is a necessary being iff x exists in all metaphysically possible worlds
C. x is a contingent being iff x exists in some but not all possible worlds
are neutral with respect to reductions of the RHS to the LHS or vice versa. So we can legitimately ask: Is a necessary being necessary because it exists in all worlds, or does it exist in all worlds because it is necessary? And: Is a contingent being contingent because it exists in only some worlds, or does it exist in only some worlds because it is contingent? My answer was that existence in all/some worlds is grounded in, and explained by, the different ways of existing of the Paradigm and what depends on it.
It seems the principle, then, is that what is possible depends upon what is actual, depends upon the potentialities that exist in what is actual, etc. Would you agree to this?
That's the next step, but my principle was merely that possible worlds talk is a very useful façon de parler, a graphic manner of speaking that allows us to picture modal relations in extensional terms using the machinery of quantification, but that necessity and contingency of existence cannot consist in, or be constituted by, existence in all/some worlds.
But I do take the next step, though I didn't work it out in the book. The Paradigm is the numero uno necessary existent and as such the ground of all actualities other than itself, but also the ground of all possibilities. Mere possibilities, after all, are not nothing, and so have some ontological status shy of actuality. So I had the not entirely original thought that mere possibilities could be identified with powers of the Paradigm.
Are there bad consequences of this, however? It seems like there is nothing actual sufficient to ground the truth of a typical counterfactual of creaturely freedom about nonexistent agents, like "If Bill the Bald Bostonian were offered the chance, he'd freely agree to murder the Yankees star pitcher". Does that mean it isn't true in any possible world? Can there be any truths about nonexistent agents and their free actions at all, assuming the only kind of free action is libertarian-free action? Can their be any truths in other possible worlds about what existent agents would freely do?
Underlying your question is whether there could be nonexistent but possible individuals. The conclusion I came to in the book was that all mere possibilities are general in nature, hence not involving specific individuals. Before Socrates came into existence there was no merely possible Socrates, though there was the possibility of there existing a snub-nosed sage, married to a shrewish wife, who was given to moments of abstraction when he communed with his daimon, etc. To get a feel for the issue here, imagine someone prophesying the coming of Socrates, master dialectician, fearless questioner of powerful men, who ran afoul of them, got sentenced to death, etc. Imagine the prophet being asked, after Socrates is on the scene, whether the Socrates in existence is the one he prophesied, or a numerically different one. My claim is that this question makes no sense. Before Socrates came into existence, there was no individual Socrates.
I was pushed into this view by my arguments against haecceity properties and also by my vew that existence is not a property added to a pre-formed fully individuated essence, but the unity of an individual's constitutents. Accordingly, existence individuates so that there is no individuation apart from existence, hence no merely possible individuals.
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