Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Existence

  • Is God Beyond All Being?

    This is a redacted re-posting of an entry that first appeared in these pages on 8 May 2015. It answers a question Fr. Kimel poses in the comments to Divine Simplicity and Modal Collapse. ………………………………. Fr. Aidan Kimel writes, Reading through Vallicella’s article, I kept asking myself, Would Mascall agree with the proposition “existence exists”? I…

  • Puzzling Over Presentism

    Presentism in the philosophy of time is the thesis that only the (temporally) present exists. This is not the tautology that only present items (times, individuals, events . . .) exist at present; it is the substantive metaphysical thesis that only present items exist simpliciter. So if something no longer exists, it does not exist…

  • The Multiverse Idea: Does it Help with the Question ‘Why Something Rather than Nothing?’

    If 'universe' refers to the totality of what exists in space-time, then there can be only one universe. Call that the ontological use of 'universe.' On that use, which accords with etymology and common sense, there cannot be multiple universes or parallel universes. But if 'universe' refers to the totality of what we can 'see'…

  • Presentism and the Existence Requirement

    Why do some find  the Existence Requirement self-evident? Could it be because of a (tacit) commitment to presentism?   Here again is the Existence Requirement: (ER) In order for something to be bad  for somebody, that person must exist at the time it is bad for him. (D. Benatar, The Human Predicament, 111,115) Assuming mortalism, after…

  • Benatar on Annihilation and the Existence Requirement

    Herewith, the eighth installment  in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the  juicy and technically rich Chapter 5 entitled "Death."  This entry covers pp. 102-118. People who dismiss this book unread are missing out on a lot of good philosophy. You are no philosopher if you refuse to examine arguments the…

  • The Two Opposites of ‘Nothing’ and the Logical Irreducibility of Being (2018 Version)

    This entry is part of the ongoing debate with the Opponent a. k. a. the Dark Ostrich. It is interesting  that 'nothing' has two opposites.  One is 'something.'  Call it the logical opposite.  The other is 'being.'  Call it the ontological opposite.  Logically, 'nothing' and 'something' are interdefinable quantifiers: D1. Nothing is F =df it is not the case that something is…

  • Singular Existence and Quantification

    For Tim M. who wants to discuss this topic with me. ComBox open. …………………….  Singular existence is the existence of particular individuals.  It is the existence attributed by a use of a singular sentence such as 'Max exists,' where 'Max' is a proper name.   A standard way to conceptualize singular existence, deriving from Quine and…

  • Why Existence is Neither a First-Level Nor a Second-Level Concept

    There are many beings or existents, but they have something in common: they exist.  Call what they have in common 'existence.'  Now what is existence?  And does existence itself exist in reality outside the mind? For me, existence is that which makes concrete things be, outside their causes, outside the mind, outside of language and…

  • Creation, Existence, and Extreme Metaphysical Realism

     This entry is a continuation of the ruminations in The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation. Recapitulation Divine creation ex nihilo is a spiritual/mental 'process' whereby an object of the divine consciousness is posited as non-object, as more than a merely intentional object, and thus as a transcendent reality. By 'transcendent reality' I mean an item…

  • The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation

    God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind.  The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness…

  • Why Something rather than Nothing? The ‘Why not?’ Response

    According to a presumably apocryphal story, Martin Heidegger asked G. E. Moore, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Moore replied, "Why not?" A reader finds the 'Moorean' response cheap and unphilosophical. Let's think about this. Suppose we ask a related but more tractable question: Why does the universe exist? and we get the response:…

  • Is It Epistemically Certain that Whatever Begins to Exist is Caused?

    I wrote that  1) Whatever begins to exist is caused is not epistemically certain. I don't deny that (1) is true; I deny that it can be known with certainty.  (As I explained earlier, truth and certainty are different properties.) And then I wrote that  If an argument is presented for (1), then I will…

  • Existence: A Challenge from a Reader

    Tim Mosteller writes, On page 2 of A Paradigm Theory of Existence when you state the "gist" of PT [The Paradigm Theory] you say,  "(PT) Necessarily, for any contingent individual x, x exists if and only if (i) there is a necessary y such that y is the paradigm existent, and (ii) y, as the…

  • Luke 2:21: Can the Not-Yet-Existent be Named?

    Luke 2:21 (NIV): On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived. (emphasis added) This New Testament passage implies that before a certain human individual came into existence, he was named, and therefore could be named.  The implication…

  • On the Expressibility of ‘Something Exists’

    I am trying to soften up the Opponent for the Inexpressible.  Here is another attempt. …………………….. Surely this is a valid and sound argument: 1. Stromboli exists.Ergo2. Something exists. Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first.  How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order…