Month: July 2024

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.