Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Existence

  • The Two Opposites of ‘Nothing’ and the Logical Irreducibility of Being

    This entry is part of the ongoing debate with the Opponent. 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 F.…

  • Creation: Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo?

    Classical theists hold that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This phrase carries a privative, not a positive, sense: it means not out of something as opposed to out of something called ‘nothing.’ This much is crystal clear. Less clear is how creation ex nihilo (CEN), comports, if it does comport, with…

  • Existence and Divine Simplicity: A Stroll Along the Via Negativa with Maimonides

    Here is an important passage from Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), The Guide to the Perplexed, Dover, p. 80: It is known that existence is an accident appertaining to all things, and therefore an element superadded to their essence. This must evidently be the case as regards everything the existence of which is due to some cause:…

  • God and the Transcendental Ego

    God does what Husserl's transcendental ego wanted to do but couldn't pull off, namely, constitute beings not as mere unities of sense, but as beings, as "independent reals" to borrow a phrase from Josiah Royce.  Husserl's transcendental idealism never gets the length of Sein; it reaches only as far as Seinsinn. This leads us to…

  • Contingent Existence Without Cause? Not Possible Says Garrigou-Lagrange

    A reader claims that "to affirm that there are contingent beings just is to affirm that they have that whereby they are, namely, a cause." This implies that one can straightaway infer 'x has a cause' from 'x is contingent.' My reader would agree with Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange who, taking the traditional Thomist position, maintains the…

  • Two Senses of ‘Contingency’ and a Bad Cosmological Argument

    Fr. Aidan Kimel asked me to comment on a couple of divine simplicity entries of his.  When I began reading the first, however, I soon got bogged down in a preliminary matter concerning wonder at the existence of the world, its contingency, and whether its contingency leads us straightaway to a causa prima.  So I…

  • Does Classical Theism Logically Require Haecceitism?

    Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity?  Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as…

  • Half-Way Fregeanism About Existence

    Another subtle existence entry to flummox and fascinate the Londonistas.  Hell, this Phoenician is flummoxed by it himself.  Ain't philosophy grand? ……………….. In section 53 of The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege famously maintains that . . . existence is analogous to number.  Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number…

  • The Univocity of ‘Exist(s)’: Obsessing Further

    The general existential, 'Philosophers exist,' is reasonably construed as an instantiation claim: G. The concept philosopher has one or more instances. But a parallel construal seems to fail in the case of the singular existential, 'Socrates exists.'  For both of the following are objectionable: S1.  The concept Socrates has one or more instances. S2.  The…

  • On an Argument for the Univocity of ‘Exist(s)’

    Here is an argument adapted from Peter van Inwagen for the univocity of 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials.  a. Number-words are univocal. b. 'Exist(s)' is a number-word. Therefore c. 'Exist(s)' is univocal. (a) is plainly true.  The words 'six' and 'forty-nine' have the same sense regardless of what we are counting.  As van Inwagen…

  • On J. P. Moreland’s Theory of Existence

    What follows is largely a summary and restatement of points I make in "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58.  It is a 'popular' or 'bloggity-blog' version of a part of that lengthy technical article.  First I summarize my agreements with J. P. Moreland.   Then I explain…

  • Descartes Meets Meinong: Might I be a Nonexistent Individual?

    Lukas Novak thinks I am being politically, or rather philosophically, 'correct' in rejecting Meinongianism.  And a relier on 'intuitions' to boot.  I plead innocent to the first charge.  As for the second, I rather doubt one can do philosophy at all without appealing to some intuition somewhere.  That would make for an interesting metaphilosophical discussion. …

  • What Problem Does Literary Fiction Pose?

    More than one.  Here is one.  And as old Chisholm used to say, you are not philosophizing unless you have a puzzle.  So try on this aporetic triad for size: 1. Purely fictional objects do not exist. 2. There are true  sentences about purely fictional objects, e.g., 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' and 'Sherlock Holmes…

  • Worship, Reference, and Existence: An Aporetic Triad

    Each of the following three propositions strikes me as very reasonably maintained.  But they cannot all be true. A. Worship Entails Reference:  If S worships x, then S refers to x.B. Reference Entails Existence: If S refers to x, then x exists.C. Worship Does Not Entail Existence: It is not the case that if S…

  • Presentism Between Scylla and Charybdis

    What better topic of meditation for New Year's Morn than the 'passage' of time. May the Reaper grant us all another year!  "I still live, I still think:  I still have to live, for I still have to think." (Nietzsche) ………….. If presentism is to be a defensible thesis, a 'presentable' one if you will, then…