Nothingness – Maverick Philosopher

Heidegger, Carnap, and Das Nichts

A Substack entry wherein I diagnose Rudolf Carnap’s Heidegger Derangement Syndrome. Rudi was down with a very bad case of it. Thanks to him it spread to a crapload of analytic bigots. Excerpt:

One of the reasons I gave my weblog the title Maverick Philosopher is because I align neither with the analytic nor with the Continental camp. Study everything, I say, and drink from every stream. “Nothing human is foreign to me.” (Terence)

Reverting to the camp metaphor, when did the camps become two? In dead earnest this occurred when Heidegger burst onto the scene in 1927 with Being and Time. I agree with Peter Simons: “Probably no individual was more responsible for the schism in philosophy than Heidegger.” (Quoted in Overgaard, et al., An Introduction to Metaphilosophy, Cambridge UP, 2013, 110.) It is not as if Heidegger set out to split the mainstream whose headwaters were in Franz Brentano into two tributaries; it is just that he started publishing things that the analytic types, who had some sympathy for Heidegger’s main teacher Husserl, could not relate to at all.

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger’s 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap’s 1932 response, “On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language.” (In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics.)

Why Do Some Physicists Talk Nonsense about Nothing?

Wherein I shovel some (un?)seriously scientistic caca into the sewer of nada.

On Reconciling Creatio Ex Nihilo with Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

Top o' the Stack.

This entry examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking. PhilPapers shows only three articles by him, the last of which appeared in 1986. )

What I argue is that similar Potterian moves can be used by an atheist to argue that the universe caused itself to exist. The upshot is that we remain stuck with the problem of reconciling the two principles.

A technical post, not for the faint of heart or weak of mind. You will have to put on your 'thinking caps' as Sister Ann Miriam said back in the first grade.

Holes, Hosts, and Guests

Some of you are confusing holes with 'guests.' You have to be able distinguish them on the notional or intensional plane to be able to identify them on the real or extensional plane should you find reasons to do so.

I gave the example of a piece of Swiss cheese. It has holes in it. I argued that (i) holes are spatiotemporal particulars and that (ii) holes exist. I then asked whether holes are material or immaterial. My motive for posing this strange question was to see if there are any decisive (discussion-ending, philosophically dispositive) counterexamples to the materialist thesis that all and only material items exist. Holes are candidate counterexamples: they exist and they are apparently immaterial. To understand how a hole could be a counterexample to materialism, however, you must not confuse a hole with its 'guest.'

Let H be a hole in a piece of Swiss cheese. The piece of cheese is the host. Without it, that very piece of cheese, H, that very hole, cannot exist. (This is a much stronger claim than the claim that Swiss cheese holes cannot exist without Swiss cheese.) That makes the hole an 'ontological parasite' of the host entity, and thus analogous to an Aristotelian accident inhering in an Aristotelian primary substance. The guest is the contingent occupant or filling of the hole, the air in H for example.

Bro Joe comments,

Holes in Swiss cheese are CO₂ gas bubbles; after you cut the cheese, they are air pockets. So, they qualify as "things." This discussion eventually involves the question of vacuums; but even outer space is not empty, there is a low density of hydrogen and helium out there, and that is even before the consideration of fields; the magnetic field, and the electrical field extend there as well. (There is one of each field in the entire universe as far as we know).

If Joe means 'material things' by 'things,' then he illustrates the confusion I mentioned. The hole in a doughnut has the doughnut as the host and air (or water or coffee, etc.) as the guest.

So the hole is not the same as the 'guest.' The hole is what it is whatever the filling. The holes in a piece of cheese submerged in water are filled with water, not air. Since a hole is what it is whatever the filling or guest, the hole is not identical to its filling. It is at least conceivable that the hole have no filling whatsoever. If that is possible, then the hole is 'no thing,' nothing, a particular 'piece' of nonbeing. (This possibility, please note, does not straightaway follow from the conceivability.)

I suppose one could argue that while it is contingent which type of occupant a hole has, it must as a matter of metaphysical necessity have some occupant or other. Holes are spatiotemporal particulars; such particulars are in spacetime; there are fields in every region of spacetime (electromagnetic, gravitational, and what all else); ergo, every hole is occupied or filled or has a guest, which is to say, every hole is material.

Is the argument I just gave rationally coercive? It is assuming that time can be assimilated to space so as to form the four-dimensional manifold, spacetime. Reasonable objections can be raised against this construct, useful as it is in physics. And what about the premise that there are fields in every region of spacetime? Is that objectively self-evident? Is it not conceivable that there are holes in fields, and thus regions of spacetime without fields?

Now we are in deep, and it's time for a nap. I leave you to ponder Lao Tzu:

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 11

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

Note the tacit identification of holes with ('pieces' of) nonbeing.

Aporetic dyad:

Holes exist.

Holes are 'pieces' of nonbeing.

Lukáš Novák on Reference to What is Not

What follows is a re-do of an entry that first saw the light of the blogosphere on the 4th of July, 2014. The draft Lukáš Novák (on my left in the photo) sent me back then for my comments has since appeared in print in Maimonides on God and Duns Scotus on Logic and Metaphysics (Volume 12: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics) eds. Gyula Klima and Alexander W. Hall, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 155-188. I note that our old sparring partner Edward Buckner has an article in this volume, "On the Authenticity of Scotus's Logical Works," pp. 55-84.

………………………………………

Our Czech friend Lukáš Novák sent me a paper in which, drawing upon John Duns Scotus, he rejects the following principle of reference:

(PR) It is impossible to refer to that which is not.

In this entry I will first pull some quotations from Novak's paper and then raise some questions about the view that he seems to be endorsing.

I. Novak's Scotistic View

Novak writes,

Scotus’ position can be simply characterized as a consistent rejection of the PR . . . . According to Scotus, the objects of any intentional relations . . . simply are not required to have any ontological status whatsoever, or, as Scotus puts it, any esse verum. The “being” expressed by the predicates exploited by Francis, like “to be known” (esse cognitum), “to be intelligible” (esse intelligibile), “to be an image of a paradigm” (esse exemplatum), “to be represented” (esse repraesentatum) and the like, is not real or true in any way, irrespectively of whether the relation involved concerns God or man.

[. . .]

It is not necessary to assume any esse essentiae in objects of knowledge: instead, Scotus speaks of “esse deminutum” here, but he points out emphatically that this “diminished being” is being only “secundum quid”, i.e., in an improper, qualified sense – this is the point of Scotus’ famous criticism of Henry of Ghent laid out in the unique question of dist. 36 of the first book of his Ordinatio. If you look for some real being in the object of intellection that it should have precisely in virtue of being such an object, there is none to be found. The only real being to be found here is the real being of the intellection, to which the esse deminutum of the intellected object is reduced.

[. . .]

In other words: if we were to make something like an inventory of reality, we should not list any objects having mere esse deminutum. By speaking about objects in intelligible being we do not take on any ontological commitment (to use the Quinean language) over and above the commitment to the existence of the intellections directed to these objects.

[. . .]

And now the crucial point: it is precisely this intelligibility, imparted to the objects by the divine intellect, what [that] makes human conceiving of the same objects possible, irrespectively of whether they have any real being or not:

[. . .]

In other words: the most fundamental reason why the PR is false is, according to Scotus, the fact that a sufficient condition of the human capacity to refer to something is the intelligibility of that something. This intelligibility, however, is bestowed on things in virtue of their being conceived, prior to creation, by the absolute divine intellect. This divine conceiving, however, neither produces nor presupposes any genuine being in the objects; for it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to. (p. 181, emphases added)

II. Some Questions and Comments

As a matter of Moorean fact we do at least seem to refer both in thought and in speech to nonexistent objects and to say things about them, true and false. The celebrated goldner Berg discussed by Bernard Bolzano, Kasimir Twardowski, Alexius von Meinong et al. is a stock example. Suppose that I am thinking about the golden mountain (GM). Since I cannot think without thinking of something, when I am thinking of or about the GM, I am thinking of something. But thinking is not like eating. Necessarily, if I eat something, that thing exists. I cannot eat a nonexistent comestible. Eating takes an existing object; thinking, however, needn't take an existing object. But it must take an object. So it is quite natural to say that in the case before us, the act of thinking is directed to a nonexistent object.

That some objects do not exist (or have any mode of being at all) would seem to following directly from the intentionality or object-directedness of consciousness. My act of thinking about the GM (or about Frodo, to use Novak's example), being intentional is directed to, intends, an object that is not part of the act, but transcendent of it. It follows straightaway that some objects of thinking and linguistic reference have no being. So far, it seems that Dr. Novak is right: we must reject (P) according to which it is impossible to refer to that which is not.

But of course this is puzzling. An object that has no being is nothing. How then can I be thinking about something that is nothing? And if what I am thinking about is nothing at all, then how is my thinking of Frodo different from my thinking of the GM? Acts are individuated by their objects; if the objects are nothing, then they do not differ and cannot serve to individuate the acts trained upon them. What's more, if the GM is nothing at all, then it has no properties; but it does have properties, ergo, etc. So we have an aporetic dyad that needs solving:

a) The GM is something (because every thinking is a thinking of something, and I am thinking of the GM.)

b) The GM is nothing (because there are no mountains of gold in reality outside my mind, nor, for that matter, inside my mind).

If I understand Novak, he wants a theory that satisfies the following desiderata or criteria of adequacy:

D1. Metaphysical possibilism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that the merely possible has any sort of being. (Novak distinguishes metaphysical possibilism and actualism from semantic possibilism and actualism. Cf. p. 185)

D2. Actualist ersatzism is to be avoided. We cannot maintain that there are actual items such as Plantingian haecceity properties that stand in for mere possibilia.

D3. The phenomenological fact that intentionality is relational and not quasi-relational (etwas Relativliches) as in Brentano is to be respected and somehow accommodated. No adverbial theories!

D4. Eliminativism about intentionality/reference is to be avoided. Intentionality is real!

D5. Nominalist reductionism according to which reference is a merely intralinguistic phenomenon is to be avoided. When I refer to something, whether existent or nonexistent, I am getting outside of language!

Novak does not list these desiderata; I am imputing them to him. He can tell me if my imputation is unjust. In any case, I accept (D1)-(D5): an adequate theory must satisfy these demands. Now how does Novak's theory satisfy them?

Well, he brings God into the picture. Some will immediately cry deus ex machina! But I think Novak can plausibly rebut this charge. If God is brought on the stage in an ad hoc manner to get us out of a philosophical jam, then a deus ex machina objection has bite. But Novak and his master Scotus have independent reasons for positing God. See p. 185. And see my substantial post on deus-ex-machina objections in philosophy, here. Suppose we have already proven, or at least given good reasons for, the existence of God. Then he can be put to work. Or, as my esteemed and fondly remembered teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses."

So how does Novak's solution work?

It is sufficient for x to be an object of thought or reference by us that it be intelligible. This intelligibility derives from the divine intellect who, prior to creation, conceives of such items as the golden mountain. But this conceiving does not impart to them any real being. Nor does it presuppose that they have any real being. In themselves, they have no being at all. God's conceiving of nonexistent objects is a wholly immanent operation the effect of which remains wholly within the subject of the operation, namely, the divine mind. The intelligibility is not projected onto items external to the divine intellect. And yet the nonexistent objects acquire intelligibility. It is this intelligibility that makes it possible for us finite minds to think the nonexistent without it being the case that nonexistent objects have any being at all.

This is the theory, assuming I have understood it. And it does seem to satisfy the desiderata (D1)-(D5) with the possible exception of (D3). But here is one concern. We are being told that the intelligibility of the GM, for example, is due to a wholly immanent operation on God's part. That is: no act of divine intellection is directed outward toward a transcendent object even if said object is beingless. But if the divine production of the intelligibility of the GM, say, is wholly immanent then this can only mean that the production proceeds by God's conceiving-GM-ly. But this amounts to adverbialism and a denial of the relationality of intentionality, which Novak is otherwise committed to. Cf. the "pre-philosophical datum" mentioned on p. 186 according to which "we all know that we can refer to non-existing things" such as Frodo Baggins, and yet "we all know that they are not there." Frodo, after all, is purely fictional item "made up" by Tolkien. Talk of reference whether it be thinking reference or reference expressed verbally implies relationality: I am related to what I refer to. But talk of wholly immanent operations of cognition and conception sits none too well with the relational talk of reference.

So my question for Novak is: Did Scotus anticipate the adverbialism of Roderick Chisholm, et al.? Is Scotus an adverbialist?

Here is a second concern of mine. We are told that:

. . . it is a universal truth that cognition is an immanent operation, one whose effect remains wholly in its subject (and so does not really affect its object) – in this elementary point divine cognition is not different. Accordingly, objects need not have any being whatsoever in order to be capable of being referred to.

This implies that both divine and creaturely cognition and conceiving are wholly immanent operations. So what is going on when I think of, or refer to, the GM? It seem that I too would have to be conceiving-GM-ly. But then the objections to adverbialism would kick in.

Here is a third concern not unrelated to the second. The Scotistic-Novakian theory seems to imply that when I think about the golden mountain I am thinking about an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. But that is not what I seem to be thinking about. (And how would I gain access to God's mind?) It falls afoul of the phenomenology of intentionality. What I seem to be thinking about has very few properties (being golden, being a mountain) and perhaps their analytic entailments, and no hidden properties such as the property of being identical to an operation wholly immanent to the divine intellect. An intentional object that does not exist has precisely, all and only, the properties it is intended as having.

Connected with this third concern is the suspicion that on Novak's Scotistic theory the act-object distinction is eliminated, a distinction that is otherwise essential to his approach. He wants to deny that merely intentional objects have any being of their own. So he identifies them with divine conceivings. But this falls afoul of a point insisted on by Twardowski.

My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind. But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw. Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.

My point could be put like this. The typical merely intentional, hence nonexistent, object such as the golden mountain does not have the nature of an experience or mental act; it is an object of such an act. But if merely intentional objects are divine conceivings, then they have the nature of an experience. Ergo, etc. Novak's theory appears to fall into 'divine psychologism.'

The Strange Thought of Absolute Nothingness

I had the giddy thought of absolute nothingness as a boy; the old man I've become can't quite recapture in full its eldritch quality. But he can rigorously think what the boy could mainly only feel.

The boy reasoned that if God hadn't created anything, then only God would exist. But suppose no God either! And then the strangeness supervened as the boy lay in bed staring at the ceiling. There would then have been nothing, absolutely nothing! How strange!

The giddiness arose by a double subtraction. The boy subtracted creation leaving only God. Then he subtracted God leaving only nothing. The boy was innocent of philosophy and nothing from that field impeded the supervenience of strangeness as he tried to apprehend this 'nothing.'

'Necessary being' was not in the ten-year-old's vocabulary. The nonexistence of God is impossible if God is a necessary being. And surely the ens realissimum, the ens absolutum, the apha and omega of the alphabet of Being, could not be a merely contingent being. That much seems very clear to the old man.

Unfortunately, the divine necessity is not transparent to our intellects. We cannot see into the divine necessity. We have no INsight in this instance. We cannot see with indubitable evidence that God exists and cannot not exist. Why not? I conjecture that it is because of the structure of the discursive intellect.

We think in opposites. In the present case, the opposites are essence and existence. We say that in God, essence entails existence, or essence is (identically) existence, or it is the nature of God to exist. Or perhaps we say, as I recall Saint Bonaventura saying, that if God is God, then God exists: the divine self-identity entails the divine existence. But the sense of these claims rests on the logically prior distinction of essence and existence as two opposing factors that the discursive intellect must keep apart if it is to think clearly. And so the very sense of the claims militates against apodictic insight into their truth.

We cannot help but bring the distinction between essence and existence to God when we try to think about him. This distinction that we cannot help but bring prevents us from rendering the divine necessity transparent to our intellects in such a way that we cannot doubt the existence of God. The objects of the finite intellect are finitized objects in which essence and existence fall asunder. They are objects among objects subject to distinctions among distinctions. God or the ens absolutum cannot but be a finitized object to our ectypal intellects. God himself, however, is nothing finite, no object among objects, no token of a type, no instance of an eidos. We cannot get what want: objective certainty of the existence of the Absolute in which there is such a tight coalescence between the intellect and its Infinite Object that no conceivable logical wedge can be driven between intellect and Object. We want objective certainty! Husserl: Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben!

According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God.

Try it for yourself. Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing. Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score. The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.

I grant that if God exists, then he necessarily exists. But this concession does not help. For one cannot infer from the divine modal status — necessarily existent if existent — that God exists. For God might be impossible. Necessarily existent if existent, but, contrapositively: impossibly existent if not existent. Anselm's Insight — that than which no greater can be conceived is either necessary or impossible — does not validate Anselm's Argument.

"But surely God is possible!"

How do you know that? There is no apodictic transition from conceivability by a finite mind to possibility in reality. Besides, you cannot mean by 'possible' 'merely possible,' possible but not actual. You must mean that God is possible in a sense of 'possible' that does not exclude actuality. But then your argument begs the question.

I am not maintaining that the ens necessarium (God) does not exist. I am maintaining that we have no insight into God's existence that allays all possible doubts. And so we are left with the seeming possibility of absolute nothingness, and the giddiness or (Heideggerian) Angst that it elicits in some of us.

If God almighty cannot ban the specter of absolute nothingness, or hold it at bay, can anything? Let's see.

The 'thought' that there might have been nothing at all is unthinkable. It is self-cancelling. Here is an argument:

The following are contradictory propositions:

1) Something exists.

2) Nothing exists.

(1) is plainly true. It follows that (2) is false. So much for truth value. What about modal status? Is (1) contingent or necessary? If (1) is contingent, then its negation is possible, in which case it is possible that (2) be true. If (1) is necessary, then it is not possible that (2) be true.

Is it possible that (2) be true, that nothing exist? Is it possible that there be nothing at all? Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.

Think about it, muchachos!

Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist. This of course is not a proof of God, but of something rather less impressive, a state of affairs. The state of affairs, There is something, necessarily obtains. It cannot not obtain. And it cannot obtain necessarily without existing necessarily. Not a proof of God, but a starting point for a proof of God; in any case an important result: we seem to have achieved a knock-down proof of the necessary existence of something by sheer thinking. Thought makes certain contact with reality 'by its own power' without the mediation of the senses, or anything else for that matter, including divine revelation. Parmenides vindicatus est.

If this is right, then the thought of absolute nothingness is an unthinkable thought, hence no thought at all, a product of confusion, a 'ghost' to be dispelled by clear thinking. My ten-year-0ld self was perhaps 'spooked' by an unthinkable thought. Hence, the eldritch quality, the strangeness the old man cannot forget. It was perhaps only an emotional state induced by an attempt to overstep the bounds of intelligibility. Perhaps the boy succumbed to a purely subjective emotional state bare of cognitive content, bereft of intentionality, revelatory of nothing. Hence the giddy strangeness, a close cousin to Heidegger's Angst.

Up to this point Father Parmenides would agree.

But then what of the Humean reasoning? Does it not clamor for 'equal time'? An aporia threatens:

(H) Nothing is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.

(P) Something is such that its existence can be seen to be necessary by thought alone.

I don't know how to resolve this contradiction. I am of two minds. Parmenides and Hume are battling for hegemony in my shallow pate.

Can I conceive (think without internal logical contradiction) the nonexistence of what is the case, or a total way things are?

The Humean-Heideggerian part of my mind says Yes: you are thinking the thought of radical contingency. Everything is contingent including there being anything at all. There really might have been nothing at all. And this real possibility is a live one, moment to moment. There is no ultimate metaphysical support anywhere. That there is anything at all is a brute fact, a fact without cause or explanation, and thus a fact wholly unintelligible, hence ab-surd, We are hanging in the Void. Ich habe Angst vor dem Nichts! Heidegger's Angst and Sartre's nausea are revelatory emotions: they reveal, respectively, the ultimate nothingness at the base of all that exists, and the ultimate absurdity or unintelligibility of the existing of what exists.

The Parmenidean part of my mind says No: Thought and Being are 'the same.' You have grasped by sheer thought alone the absolute necessity of there being a way things are, an ultimate context. And so you were indeed 'spooked' as a boy when it seemed you looked into the abyss of utter nothingness and contextlessness.

Something about Nothing

Consider the following contradictory propositions:

1) Something exists.

2) Nothing exists.

Is it possible that nothing exist? Is it possible that there be nothing at all? Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.

Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist.

A strict Pyrrhonian would have to say that there is an argument that cancels out the one just given.

Is there?

Once More on Becoming Past and Becoming Nothing

I maintain that in the following conditional, the consequent (2) does not follow from the antecedent (1).

(*) If (1) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly past, then (2) X ceases to exist.

The Londoner replies

You claim that the truth of the antecedent (1) is consistent with the falsity of the consequent (2), i.e. consistent with X not having ceased to exist. But that claim implies that both “X still exists” and “X has ceased to exist” could be false.

I don’t follow.

Consider a spatial analog. I am in a meeting with some people. I then leave the room. In so doing I cease to be spatially present to those people and the space they occupy. But no one will conclude that I have ceased to exist by leaving the room.

Why not? Well, where a thing is has no bearing on whether it is. If you can grasp that, then it ought to be at least conceivable that when a thing is has no bearing on whether it is. And if that is conceivable, then you ought to be able to grasp that (2) does not follow from (1). An item can become wholly past without prejudice to its existence.

Now obviously 'existence' here refers to tense-free existence. That the Londoner is not grasping this is shown by his use of 'still exists.' The claim is not the logically contradictory one that an item that has become wholly past still exists. For if a thing still exists, then it exists (present tense). The claim is that it is conceivable that what has become wholly past has not been annihilated: it has not become nothing. For (2) to follow from (1), presentism would have to be brought in as an auxiliary premise. But on presentism, that which has become wholly past has become nothing at all.

Does when a thing is determine whether it is? This is not obvious. For it could be — it is epistemically possible — that when a thing is has no bearing on whether it is. Two views. On one view, temporal location determines whether or not a thing is or exists. Presentism is one type of this view. On presentism, all and only that which is located in or at the temporal present exists. This implies that items not so located — those that are wholly past or wholly future — do not exist.

On the second view, temporal location does not determine whether or not a thing is or exists. 'Eternalism' as it is known in the trade — the term is a bit of misnomer but let that pass — is a type of this view. On eternalism, past, present, and future times and the items at those times (e.g. events) all exist equally, i.e., in the same sense of 'exists.'

Now it should be perfectly obvious that this sense must be tense-neutral, or tense-free, or tenseless. And I have no desire to paper over the considerable problems that arise when we try to specify exactly what this tense-neutral use of 'exists' comes to. But that is not our present topic.

Becoming Past and Becoming Nothing

Londoner in Lockdown writes,

I am still puzzling about the connection between your

(1) X ceases to be temporally present by becoming wholly past.

and

(2) X ceases to exist.

I think I understand (2). It means that there was once such a thing as X, but there is no longer such a thing as X.

But what does (1) mean? Does it mean what (2) means? In that case, (2) indeed follows from (1).

But you can't have intended that. So what do you mean by (1)?

Perhaps a spatial analog of (1) will help convey what I mean:

1*) X ceases to be spatially present by becoming wholly elsewhere.

Now (1*) is not idiomatic English, but the thought is clear. And the thought is trivially true. Suppose the boundaries of the spatially present are given by the dimensions of my lot. So when I say 'here' I refer to the area of my lot together with all its sub-areas. Suppose a cat that is wholly within the boundaries of my lot trespasses onto your adjacent lot thereby becoming wholly elsewhere. Max was wholly here in my yard, but now he is wholly there in yours. Spatial translations such as this one typically occur without prejudice to the existence of the moving item. Thus the cat does not cease to exist by moving from my property onto your property. (Nor does the cat suffer any diminution of its degree of existence, if there are degrees of existence, or any change in its mode of existence, if there are modes of existence.)

In short, Max the cat exists just as robustly in your yard as in mine. Spatial translation is existence-neutral. No one is a spatial presentist. No one holds that all and only what exists here, exists.

Surely it is conceivable — whether or not it is true — that becoming wholly past is existence-neutral. It is conceivable that something that becomes wholly past not be affected in its existence by its becoming wholly past. On this understanding of (1), (1) does not straightaway — i.e., immediately, without auxiliary premises — entail (2). (1) and the negation of (2) are logically consistent.

Now if you insist that (1) entails (2), then I will point out that this is so only if you assume that all and only the temporally present exists.

Do my sparring partners now see that there is a genuine question here? The question is whether it makes sense to maintain that, among the items that exist in time, some are non-present. I say that it does make sense, whether or not in the end it is true; consequently, tenseless theories of time cannot be simply dismissed out of hand. A corollary of this is that presentism is not obviously true, or even more outrageously, a matter of common sense as some have the chutzpah to say.

Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyper-kineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce far niente

Sweet to do nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking.

Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

A New and Improved Argument for the Necessity of Something

Previous versions were long-winded. Herewith, an approach to the lapidary.

1) If nothing exists, then something exists.
2) If something exists, then something exists.
3) Either nothing exists or something exists.
Therefore
4) Necessarily, something exists.

The argument is valid. The second two premises are tautologies. The conclusion is interesting, to put it mildly: it is equivalent to the proposition that it is impossible that there be nothing at all. But why accept (1)?

Argument for (1)

5) If p, then the proposition expressed by 'p' is true.
Therefore
6) If nothing exists, then nothing exists is true.
7) The consequent of (6) commits us to the existence of at least one proposition.
Therefore
1) If nothing exists, then something exists.

Surely (5) is unproblematic, being one half of the disquotational schema,

DS. P iff the proposition expressed by 'p' is true.

For example, snow is white if and only if snow is white is true. The semantic ascent on the right-hand side of the biconditional involves the application of the predicate 'true' to a proposition. So it is not the case that the left and right hand sides of the biconditional say the same thing or express the same proposition. The LHS says that snow is white; the RHS says something different, namely, that the proposition expressed by 'snow is white' is true. The RHS has an ontological commitment that the LHS does not have: the RHS commits us to a proposition. Since the RHS is true, the proposition exists. (Cf. Colin McGinn, Logical Properties, Oxford UP 2000, 92-93. I am taking from McGinn only the insight that the LHS and RHS of (DS) do not say the same thing.)

But what about the inference from (5) to (6)? Can it be questioned? Yes, if we are willing to countenance counterexamples to (5) and thereby call into question Bivalence, the semantic principle that every proposition is either true or false, but not both. I'll pursue this in a later post. If, however, one accepts Bivalence and its syntactic counterpart, Excluded Middle, then it looks as if I've got me a rigorous a priori argument for the necessity of something and the impossibility of there being nothing at all.

If Nothing Exists, is it True that Nothing Exists? Well Yes, but Then . . .

Here is a puzzle for London Ed and anyone else who finds it interesting. It is very simple, an aporetic dyad.

To warm up, note that if snow is white, then it is true that snow is white. This seems quite unexceptionable, a nice, solid, datanic starting point. It generalizes, of course: for any proposition p, if p, then it is true that p. Now the connection between antecedent and consequent is so tight that we are loathe to say that it just happens to hold. It holds of necessity. So here is the first limb of our aporetic dyad:

a) Necessarily, for any p, if p, then it is true that p.

Equivalently: there is no possible world in which both p and it is not true that p. For example, there is no possible world in which both 7 + 5 = 12 and it is not true that 7 + 5 = 12.

Intuitively, though, there might have been nothing at all. Is it not possible that nothing exists? Things exist, of course. But might it not be that everything that exists exists contingently? If so, then there might never have existed anything. Our second limb, then, is this:

b) Possibly, nothing exists.

Equivalently: There is at least one possible world in which nothing exists.

Both limbs of the dyad are plausible, but they can't both be true. To see this, substitute 'nothing exists' for 'p' in (a) and drop the universal quantifier and the modal operator. This yields:

c) If nothing exists, then it is true that nothing exists.

But (c) can't be true in every world given (b). For if (c) is true, then something does exist, namely, the truth (true proposition) that nothing exists. But (c) is true in every world given (a).

Therefore (a) and (b) cannot both be true: the dyad is logically inconsistent.

So something has to give, assuming we are not willing to accept that the dyad is an aporia in the strict sense, a conceptual impasse that stops the discursive intellect dead in its tracks. A-poria: no way. Do we reject (a) or do we reject (b)? If a solution is possible, then I am inclined to reject (b).

But then I must affirm its negation:

d) Necessarily, something (or other) exists.

(Note that if it is necessary that something exist, it does not follow that some one thing necessarily exists. If there is no possible world in which nothing exists, it does not follow that there is some one thing that exists in every world.)

Yikes! Have I just proven by a priori reasoning the necessary existence of something or other outside the mind? Of course, I have not proven the necessary existence of God; I may have proven only the necessary existence of those abstract objects called propositions.

(Father Parmenides, with open arms, welcomes home his prodigal son?)

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 F.

D2. Something is F =_df it is not the case that nothing is F.

These definitions, which are part of the articulation of the Discursive Framework (DF), give us no reason to think of one term as more basic than the other. Logically, 'nothing' and 'something' are on a par. Logically, they are polar opposites. Anything you can say with the one you can say with the other, and vice versa.

We also note that as quantifiers, as terms expressing logical quantity, 'nothing' and 'something' are not names or referring expressions.

So far I have said nothing controversial.

Ontologically, however, being and nothing are not on a par. They are not polar opposites. Being is primary, and nothing is derivative. (Note the ambiguity of 'Nothing is derivative' as between 'It is not the case that something is derivative' and 'Nothingness is derivative.' The second is meant.)

Now we enter the arena of controversy. For it might be maintained that there are no ontological uses of 'being,' and 'nothing,' that talk of being and nothing is replaceable without remainder by use of the quantifiers defined in (D1) and (D2).

Quine said that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." (Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 97)I deny it: there is more to existence than what the existential quantifier expresses. Quine's is a thin theory of existence; mine is a thick theory. Metaphorically, existence possesses an ontological thickness. This is very important for metaphysics if true.

I won't be able to prove my point because nothing in philosophy can be proven. But I can argue for my point in a fallacy-free manner. I am justified in holding my view so long as no one can convict me of a clear-cut error.

Suppose we try to define the existential 'is' in terms of the misnamed because question-begging 'existential' quantifier. (The proper moniker is 'particular quantifier.') This is standardly done as follows.

D3. y is/exists =_df for some x, y = x.

In plain English, for y to be or exist is for y to be identical to something. For Quine to be or exist is for Quine to be identical to something. In general, to be is to be identical to something, not some one thing of course, but something or other. This thing, however, must exist, and in a sense not captured by (D3). Thus

Quine exists =_df Quine is identical to something that exists

and

Pegasus does not exist =_df nothing that exists is such that Pegasus is identical to it

Pegasus is diverse from everything that exists.

The point, which many find elusive, is that the items in the domain of quantification must be there to be quantified over, where 'there' has not a locative but an existential sense. For if the domain includes nonexistent objects, then, contrary to fact, Pegasus would exist in virtue of being identical to an item in this widened domain, namely, Pegasus.

The conclusion is (to me!) obvious: one cannot explicate the existential 'is' in terms of the particular quantifier without circularity, without presupposing that things exist in a sense of 'exist' that is not captured by (D3).

Mere logicians won't accept or perhaps even understand this since existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana observes. (Scepticism and Animal Faith, Dover, 1955, p. 48, orig. publ. 1923.) You have to have metaphysical aptitude to understand it. (But now I am tending toward the tendentious.)

Intellectual honesty requires that I admit that I am basing myself on an intuition, what J. Maritain calls the intuition of Being. I find it self-evident that the existence of a concrete individual is an intrinsic determination that makes it be as opposed to not be. This implies a real distinction between x and the existence of x. Accordingly, the existence of an individual cannot be reduced to its self-identity: the existence of Quine does not reduce to Quine's being (identical to) Quine, as on the thin theory. And the nonexistence of Pegasus does not reduce to its being diverse from everything. (If to be is to be identical to something, then not to be is to be diverse from everything.)

The Opponent does not share my intuition. In the past I have berated him for being 'existence-blind' but he might plausibly return the 'compliment' by accusing me of double vision: I see Socrates but I also 'see' the existence of Socrates when there is no such 'thing.'

So far, not good: I can't refute the Opponent but he can't refute me. Stand-off. Impasse, a-poria.

Let me try a different tack. Does the Opponent accept

ENN. Ex nihilo nihil fit?

Out of nothing nothing comes. Note that 'nothing' is used here in two different ways, ontologically and logically/quantificationally. For what the hallowed dictum states is that it is not the case that something arises from nothing/Nothingness.

Now if the Opponent accepts the truth or even just the meaningfulness of (ENN), then he must (!) admit that there are two senses of 'nothing,' the logical and the ontological, and correspondingly, two senses of 'something.' If so, then being and nothing cannot be exhaustively understood in terms of logical quantifiers and propositional negation, and then the thin theory bites the dust.

But if the thin theory succumbs, then there is more to existence than can be captured within the Discursive Framework.