Existence – Page 18 – Maverick Philosopher

Presentism and Existence-Entailing Relations: An Aporetic Tetrad

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, though it is, as 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 nonpresent item. 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 nonpresent. If presentism is true, then E does not exist. And if E does not exist, then E does not stand in the earlier than relation to T. If, on the other hand, there are events that exist but are nonpresent, then presentism is false.

How will 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 deny (B) 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 relations are either existence-entailing or existence-symmetric.

2. Earlier than is a 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 relation? What else could it be?

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

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

Aquinas on Why Being Cannot Be a Genus

At 998b22 of his Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that being cannot be a genus. Thomas Aquinas gives his version of the argument in Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I, ch. 25, para. 6. I find the presentation of the doctor angelicus clearer than that of the philosophus. After quoting Thomas' argument, I will offer a rigorous reconstruction and explanation of it. The argument issues in an important conclusion, one highly relevant to my running battle with the partisans of the 'thin' conception of being.

The Anton C. Pegis translation reads as follows:

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Hume on Belief and Existence

Section VII of Book I of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is relevant to recent investigations of ours into belief, existence, assertion, and the unity of the proposition. In this section of the Treatise, Hume anticipates Kant's thesis that 'exists' is not a real predicate, and Brentano's claim that the essence of judgment cannot consist in the combining of distinct concepts.

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The Copula: Adorno Contra Heidegger

Time was when I was much interested in the philosophers of the Frankfurter Schule. That was in the 'seventies and 'eighties. Less interested now, I am still intrigued by Adorno's critique of Heidegger. Is it worth anything? For that matter, are Heidegger's ideas worth anything? Let's see.

I will explain one aspect of Heidegger's notorious Seinsfrage, an aspect centering on the role of the copula in predicative sentences/judgments. True-blue Heideggerians may not recognize much of their Master here, but I'm a thinker not an exegete. I will also consider what Adorno has to say in criticism of Heidegger in the section on the copula in Negative Dialektik.

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Paul Edward’s Heidegger’s Confusions: A Two-Fold Ripoff

(This was written 30 January 2006. Paul Edwards, though he made some significant contributions to contemporary philosophy, was a notorious Heidegger-hater. I slap him around good in this piece, ending with a nice polemical punch. He asked for it, and he deserves it. Not that I think that much of Heidegger. Recently, controversy about the old Nazi has erupted anew. More on that later today or tomorrow.)

I recently purchased, but then returned, Paul Edward’s Heidegger’s Confusions (Prometheus, 2004) when I found that it is nothing but an overpriced reprint of previously available materials. Twenty dollars for a thin (129 pp.) paperback is bad enough, especially given the mediocre production values of Prometheus Books; but the clincher was my discovery that there is nothing in this volume that has not appeared elsewhere. Edwards and his editors didn’t even bother to change the British quotation conventions in two of the reproduced articles to their Stateside counterparts.

There is also the question of the quality of Edward’s Heidegger-critique, a topic that needs to be treated more fully in a separate post. But for now a comment on Edwards’ refutation-strategy in his second chapter, "Heidegger’s Quest for Being." (What follows summarizes, but also extends, the discussion in my article, "Do Individuals Exist?" Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XX (1995), pp. 195-220, and my book A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002), Chapter 4.)

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Wonder at Existence

Existence elicited nausea from Sartre's Roquentin, but wonder from Bryan Magee:

. . . no matter what it was that existed, it seemed to me extraordinary beyond all wonderment that it should. It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn't there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation — the least unlikely state of affairs, the most economical solution to all possible problems, the simplest explanation — nothing is what you would have expected there to be. But such was not the case, self-evidently. (Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 13)

What elicited Magee's wonderment was the self-evident sheer existence of things in general: their being as opposed to their nonbeing. How strange that anything at all exists! Now what could a partisan of the thin conception of Being or existence make of Magee's intuition of existence?

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Nausea at Existence

Existence is often 'invisible' to analytic types well-versed in logic, for existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana sagely remarked in Scepticism and Animal Faith (Dover, 1955, p. 48) It is so odious, in fact, that they need to mask it under the misnamed 'existential' quantifier. So I need to resort to extreme methods to bring it into view I will quote from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.

Now it goes without saying that I don't agree with Sartre that existence is an unintelligible surd. For me it is the opposite of unintelligible. But what I will borrow from Sartre is the insight that existence is extralogical: it is precisely not what Quine said it was whn he said that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage.

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Sartre’s Existentialism and the Meaning of Life, Part Two

Near the end of Part One of this two-part series, I wrote,

. . . Sartre, denying God, puts man in God's place: he ascribes to man a type of freedom and a type of responsibility that he cannot possibly possess, that only God can possess. He fails to see that human freedom is in no way diminished by an individual's free acceptance of an objective constraint on his behavior. This is because human freedom is finite freedom; only an infinite freedom, a divine freedom, would be diminished by objective constraints.

This may well be the crux of the matter. But we need to explore it in greater depth. For a theist, God is the absolute. But Sartre famously denies God on the ground that a for-itself-in-itself is impossible: see Being and Nothingness. For Sartre the God-denier, man is the absolute. But there is no Man, only men. Man is an abstraction. So the absolute fractures into finite individual subjectivities, each of which exists contingently. Here is a crucial passage:

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Is Meinong’s Theory of Objects “Obviously Self-Contradictory?” Van Inwagen Says ‘Yes’

Relevant to my interest in the philosophy of existence is Peter van Inwagen's "McGinn on Existence" which is online here, and published in Andrea Bottani and Richard Davies (eds.), Modes of Existence: Papers in Ontology and Philosophical Logic, Ontos Verlag, 2006, pp. 105-129. On p. 108 we read:

. . . Meinong's theory has a rather more important defect than its incorporation of the idea of modes of being, and that is that it's self-contradictory — obviously self-contradictory. Here is one way of bringing out the contradiction in the theory: Meinongianism entails that there are things that participate in neither mode of being, things that have no being of any sort; but if there are such things, they obviously have being. For a thing to have being is for there to be a such a thing as it is; what else could being be? Now this defect in Meinong's theory — its being obviously self-contradictory — is avoided by certain recent theories whose proponents describe themselves as Meinongians, philosophers such as Terence Parsons and Richard Routley, among others. I call these people neo-Meinongian, since, although their theories incorporate many Meinongian elements, they reject a component of Meinong's theory of objects that I consider essential to it, the doctrine of Aussersein, a doctrine an immediate consequence of which is the self-contradiction that I just called your attention to: that there are things of which it is true that there are no such things. (Emphasis in original.)

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Pavel Tichý on Descartes’ Meditation Five Ontological Argument

This post is the fourth in a series on Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God" (J. Phil., August 1979, 403-420). In section II we find a critique of Descartes' Meditation Five ontological argument. Tichý claims to spot two fallacies in the argument. I will argue that only one of them is a genuine fallacy. One could present the Cartesian argument in Tichý's jargon as follows:

1. The requisites of the divine office include all perfections.
2. Existence is a perfection.
Therefore
3. The divine office is occupied.

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More on Tichý on Existence: One of His Arguments Examined

This post is a sequel to Pavel Tichý on Existence. There I explained Tichý's theory as a variation on the Fregean theory and made a start on a critique of it. Here I examine an argument of his for it. He writes,

If existence were a property ascribable to individuals, then the force of such an ascription could only be to the effect that the individual in question is indeed one of the individuals there are. But since any individual is, trivially, one of the individuals there are, all ascriptions of existence would be tautologically true. If existence were properly raised in regard to individuals, then a negative answer to such a question would be self-defeating: it would suggest that no question has in fact been asked and that, accordingly, no answer is called for in the first place. Genuine existence questions would be answerable wholesale and a priori in the affirmative. ("Existence and God," Journal of Philosophy, August 1979, pp. 404-405)

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Pavel Tichý on Existence

This post consists of some notes and commentary on Section I of Pavel Tichý's "Existence and God," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LXXVI, no. 8, August 1979. Section I of Tichý's article is about designation and existence. Section II exposes two fallacies in Descartes' ontological argument. Section III provides a valid reconstruction of Anselm's Proslogion III ontological argument. This post comments on section I only. I didn't discuss Tichý in my otherwise rather thorough book on existence, so this post is yet another postscript to A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

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Milton Munitz on Boundless Existence, Cosmic Spirituality, and the Meaning of Life

The last book Milton K Munitz published before his death in 1995 is entitled Does Life Have a Meaning? (Prometheus, 1993). It is a fitting capstone to his distinguished career and exemplifies the traits for which I admire him: he is clear and precise like a good analytic philosopher, but he evinces the spiritual depth conspicuous by its absence in most analysts. Philosophy for him was not a mere academic game: he grappled with ultimates. Herewith, some notes toward a summary and critique of Munitz's position on the meaning-of-life question. I will also draw upon his penultimate book, The Question of Reality (Princeton 1990), as well as Existence and Logic (NYU Press, 1974) and The Mystery of Existence (NYU Press, 1974). These titles will be abbreviated by 'LM,' ' QR,' 'EL,' and 'ME,' respectively. Words and phrases enclosed in double quotation marks are quotations from Munitz; otherwise I use single 'quotation' marks.

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Can Existence Be Analyzed in Terms of Power? Commentary on Sophist 247e

At Sophist 247e, Plato puts the following into the mouth of the Eleatic Stranger:

I suggest that anything has real being that is so constituted as to possess any sort of power either to affect anything else or to be affected, in however small a degree, by the most insignificant agent, though it be only once. I am proposing as a mark to distinguish real things that they are nothing but power. (Cornford tr.)

The gist of the passage is that what makes a thing real or existent is its (active) power to affect other things or its (passive) power to be affected by them. In sum,

D. For any x, x exists =_df x is causally active or passive.

Thus everything causally active/passive exists, and only the causally active/passive exists. The definition rules out of existence all 'causally inert' items such as propositions as Frege construes them, namely, as the senses of context-free indicative sentences. And of course it rules out sets of Fregean propositions. But what about the mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) set of the books on my desks? Each of the books is existent or real by (D) and so is the object resulting from the bundling of the books together; but the set of these books is arguably abstract and thus causally inert. So if (D) is true, we cannot admit mathematical sets into our ontology. For such items do not enter into causal relations. Fregean propositions and mathematical sets are therefore putative counterexamples to (D). If these counterexamples are genuine then (D) fails extensionally: the extension of the existent is wider than the extension of the causally active/passive.

But what interests me at the moment is not the extensional correctness of (D) but a deeper question. Even if we assume that (D) is extensionally correct, i.e., that all and only existents are causally active/passive, does (D) tell us what it is for an item to exist? When we say of a thing that it exists, what are we saying about it? That it is causally active/passive? My answer is in the negative — even if we assume that all and only existents are causally active/passive.

My reason is quite simple. For an item to be capable of acting or being acted upon it must 'be there' or exist! 'Before' it can be a doer or a done-to it must exist. (The 'before' is to be taken logically not temporally.) The nonexistent cannot act or be acted upon. There is no danger that winged horses will collide with airplanes. The reason is not that winged horses are abstract or causally inert objects; the reason is that they do not exist. Winged horses, if there were any, would belong to the category of the causally active/passive. But they don't exist — which is the reason why they cannot act or be acted upon. They are not abstract items but nonexistent concrete items. Existence, therefore, is a necessary condition of an item's being a causal agent or patient. It follows that existence cannot be explicated in terms of power as per the Eleatic Stranger's suggestion. Existence is too fundamental to be explicated in terms of power — or anything else.

If you are having trouble seeing the point consider the winged horse Pegasus and his singleton {Pegasus}. Both of these items are nonexistent. One is concrete (causally active/passive) while the other is abstract. But neither can enter into causal relations. To say that Pegasus is concrete is to say that Pegasus, were he to exist, would belong among the causally active/passive. What prevents him from being such is his nonexistence. His existence, therefore, cannot be explicated in terms of causal activity/passivity.

There is a tendency to conflate two different questions about existence. One question about existence concerns what exists. Answers to this question can be supplied in the form of definitions like (D) above. But there is a deeper question about existence, namely, the question as what it is for an existing thing to exist. What I have just argued is that this second question cannot be answered with any definition like (D). For even if you find a definition that is extensionally correct and immune to counterexamples, you will at the very most have specified the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing's being among existing things. You will have not thereby have put your finger on what it is for an existing item to exist.

Suppose you say that, for any x, x exists =_df x has properties. This proposal has an excellent chance of being extensionally correct: necessarily, everything that exists has properties, and everything that has properties exists. But the proposal does not get at the existence of an existing thing precisely because it presupposes the existence of existing things. This is because all such definitions are really circular inasmuch as they have the form:

For any x, x exists =_df x is ____ and x exists.

Existence itself eludes definitional grasp. Even if the existent can be defined, the Existence of the existent cannot be defined. For more on this fascinating topic, see my A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer 2002), pp. 2-8.

On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument

Cosmological arguments for the existence of God rest on several ontological assumptions none of them quite obvious, and all of them reasonable candidates for philosophical examination. Among them, (i) existence is a ‘property’ of contingent individuals; (ii) the existence of individuals is not a brute fact but is susceptible of explanation; (iii) it is coherent to suppose that this explanation is causal: that contingent individuals could have a cause of their existence. It is the third item on this list that I propose to examine here.

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