Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Having ditched his mindless anti-Trumpery, Rod Dreher is serving up better content than ever. Take a gander at the bullet points in this piece.
Here is an article on the Islamization of Vienna. The decadent Austrians and the rest of the decadent Europeans need to take a lesson from the Orange Man, "in the arena, bloodied but unbowed," and his fight, Fight, FIGHT!
This just in from Dr. Vito Caiati:
I am wondering if you have been following the ongoing, intense debate on the GOP platform that has taken place on X and in several conservative online journals, which was ignited by Edward Feser and other social conservatives, who are strongly critical of the removal of long-standing planks supporting a national ban on abortion and in favor of the traditional definition of marriage, viewing both as fundamental capitulations to the increasingly hegemonic secular ideology of the Left. (Feser on X: “The Left will force us into the catacombs, while the Right will tell us that going into the catacombs voluntarily is the most politically realistic way to keep the Left from forcing us to go there”).
Yesterday, Feser posted a short piece on his blog, “Now is the time for social conservatives to fight,” that references his tweets on X and several articles on this matter (https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/). I think what we are seeing here is the populist nature of the MAGA movement, headed by Trump, ever more openly differentiating itself from the traditional conservatism of the GOP, and I am curious to know your thoughts about this leftward cultural shift. I myself think that Feser makes some excellent points and see no reason for him and others not to fight for their moral and social ideals within the party, but also that, given the grave crisis of the nation, these do not justify any hesitation about aggressively supporting Trump/Vance.
We've discussed this before, Vito. See, for starters, Abortion and Last Night's GOP Debate (24 August 2023). There I wrote:
The overturning of Roe v. Wade returned the abortion question to the states. That means that each state is empowered to enact its own laws regulating abortion. Some states will permit abortion up to the moment of birth. Others will not. Different states, different laws.
What then are we to make of Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott and their call for a Federal law that bans abortion (apart from the usual exceptions) during the last 15 weeks of pregnancy?
Am I missing something? (When I write about political and legal issues, I write as a concerned citizen and not as an expert in these areas.) It strikes me as obvious that if the abortion issue is for the states to decide, then there cannot be any federal abortion laws.
[. . .]
The precise question is: How is a federal abortion restriction consistent with the states' right to decide the abortion laws? ND Governor Doug Burgum alone seemed to understand the problem, but his fleeting remark failed to set it forth clearly.
The answer to the precise question is that the federal restriction is not consistent with states' rights. It is unconstitutional.
This is not a very satisfying answer given that abortion is a moral abomination. (See my Abortion category for arguments.) But arguments, no matter how good, cut no ice in the teeth of our concupiscence. This is explained in my Substack article, Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained.
In the Comments, you agreed with me:
Vito's comment above is a model of how a good comment is constructed.
Note that he deals directly with the question I raised. He does not go off on a tangent, or change the subject to a topic that interests him but is not germane to my entry. He engages what I said and he lets me know whether he agrees or disagrees. As it is, he agrees.
He then supplements what I said in two ways. He points out the relevance of the Tenth Amendment to the question I posed. That had occurred to me, but I failed to mention it. Governor Burgum alluded to it near the end of that segment of the debate when he whipped out his pocket Constitution.
But what I found most useful in Vito's comment is his explanation of the confusion of Pence and Scott. Vito: >>Specifically, they seem to interpret the phrase “returned to the people and their elected representatives” as one that permits the federal legislature, the Congress, to establish a national ban on abortion during the last 15 weeks of pregnancy, save for unusual cases.<<
So the mistake that Pence and Scott made was to confuse the people of the U.S. with the people of a particular state. Here is 10A again: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Now I don't think one has to be a Constitutional scholar to know what that means. "The people" refers to the people of a given state, such as North Dakota or Massachusetts, not to all the people of the U.S.
Politicians are especially in danger, although we are all at risk. Christopher Rufo:
To say it plainly: there is no need for women in a president’s security detail. The Secret Service is an elite institution that can funnel down a large number of candidates to select the few who will protect the president. The best candidates—the strongest and fastest, the best marksmen—will be men. That’s just reality.
It’s a reality that the Secret Service is determined to circumvent. The agency itself has published its fitness standards in two parts: one for men, and a separate, less rigorous one for women.
And who is involved in "assassination prep?" Quite obviously, the Left:
The June issue of The New Republic is explicitly devoted to comparing Trump to Hitler, one of the greatest mass murderers in human history. It’s full of essays about how grim life will be under Dictator Trump. The editors justified this by saying, “Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, ‘He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.’”
Giving a Latin name to the destruction of the ancient Latin rite smacks of mockery.
In politics, as in marriage, at some point you have to settle on the best available candidate, not the best. Politics is about better and worse, not about perfect and imperfect.
Qui habet aures audiendi audiat. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
A soupçon of sanity returns to the body politic. Roger Kimball:
“Upon careful study of the foundational challenges raised in the Motion,” Cannon wrote in her ninety-three-page ruling, “the Court is convinced that Special Counsel’s Smith’s prosecution of this action breaches two structural cornerstones of our constitutional scheme — the role of Congress in the appointment of constitutional officers, and the role of Congress in authorizing expenditures by law.”
Result? “The Superseding Indictment is DISMISSED because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.”
Hit the road, Jack (and don’t you come back no more).
In another encouraging development, Elon Musk delivered a stinging rebuke to that noisome knucklehead Newsom by ordering the transfer of X and SpaceX from San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, to Texas.
According to the WSJ, Musk plans to pony up $45 million per month to a pro-Trump Super Pac.
The tables are beginning to turn. But no complacency! We know a priori that our political enemies will cheat their asses off as they did last time. It is important that we not only defeat them electorally but also demoralize them by crushing them in a landslide. All hands on deck!
Outstanding oratory last night at the RNC meeting #2 in Milwaukee. The best speeches in my view were by Vivek Ramaswamy, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, and Ben Carson, in that order. The ordinary citizens who came forward were also impressive with their tales of tragedy caused by the insanely destructive immigration policies of Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, and the Deep State reprobates who pull their strings.
You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.
Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of the presupposition on which your confidence rests that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of your presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.
Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (and thus entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational for you to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning — 'the trail goes that-a-way' — derives from a designer. Their intentionality is derivative, not intrinsic.
Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by an unguided or 'blind' process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.
But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.
As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a twisted tree root appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is:
How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations?
To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its materialistic (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutionary processes? It cannot be rational. I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:
. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, non-purposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed., Prentice-Hall 1983, p. 104)
The foregoing may be summed up in the following design argument:
1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.
2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
Therefore
3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
To resist this argument, the materialist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.
The above is an impressive argument, wouldn't you say? Of course it needs beefing up in various ways. For example, how can we be sure that there is exactly one intelligent designer and not several working in concert? If these worries can be allayed, the argument seems to establish the existence of an intelligent designer of such cognitively gifted animals as ourselves, not to mention the world in which the gifted animals are embedded. Many will be quick to identify this intelligent designer with the God of classical theism. Essential to classical theism as I am using the term is the idea that God is a personal being (tri-personal on normatively Christian accounts) who is transcendent of the physical universe which he creates and sustains in being, and is thus transcendent in the sense that he could just as well exist in his full perfection without having created anything.
But I don't believe the above argument amounts to a proof of classical theism. It does not render the latter rationally inescapable; at best, it renders it rationally acceptable. On classical theism, the intelligibility of nature has a transcendent source: it accrues to nature ab extra, which is to say: it is not immanent in nature. But why couldn't the intelligibility of nature, and with it, the cognitive reliability of the natural faculties with which we investigate nature, be inherent in the natural world? The idea is not that 'Mother Nature' is a person with conscious purposes in the way that God is a person with conscious purposes, but that nature, below the level of conscious mind, is yet mind-like in that it aims at certain outcomes, and thus has 'purposes' in an analogous sense of the term. Dispositionality provides an analogy in the small for the immanent intentionality and teleology of nature in the large.
To say that a wine glass is fragile, for example, is to say that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck or dropped onto a hard surface from a sufficient height. Several philosophers have noted the analogy with conscious intentionality. A consciously intentional state exhibits
a. directedness to an object;
b. an object that may or may nor exist;
c. an object that may be, and typically is, indeterminate or incomplete.
For example, right now I am gazing out my study window at Superstition Mountain. The gazing is an intentional state: it is of or about something, a definite something. It takes an accusative, and does so necessarily. The accusative or intentional object in question presumably exists. But the intentional object is what it is whether or not it exists. The phenomenological description of object and act remains the same whether or not the object exists. Moreover, the object as presented in the act of gazing is incomplete: there are properties such that the intentional object neither has them nor their complements. Thus, to a quick glance, what is given in the intentional experience is 'a purplish mountain.' Just that. Now anything purple or purplish is colored, and anything colored is extended; but being colored and being extended are not properties of the intentional object as such. No doubt they are properties of the mountain itself in reality; but they are not properties of the precise intentional object of my gazing, which has all and only the properties it is seen to have. Furthermore, in reality, yonder mountain is either such that someone is climbing on it or not; but the intentional object of my momentary gazing is indeterminate with respect to the property of being climbed on by someone.
The same or similar points can be made about dispositions. If a piece of glass is fragile, then it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. There cannot be a disposition that is not a disposition to do something, to shatter, or explode, or melt.
Second, the reality of a disposition is independent of its manifestation: a fragile piece of glass is actually fragile whether or not it ever breaks. From the fact that x is disposed to F, one cannot infer that x ever Fs. This parallels a feature of intentionality: from the fact that x is thinking about Fs one cannot infer that there exist Fs that x is thinking about. (If I am thinking about unicorns it does not follow that there exist unicorns I am thinking about; if I want a sloop it doesn't follow that there is a sloop I want; if Ernest is hunting lions it doesn't follow that there are any lions he is hunting.)
Third, although a manifested disposition is a fully determinate state of affairs, this complete determinateness is not present in the disposition qua disposition. The disposition to shatter if suitably struck is not the disposition to shatter into ten pieces if suitably struck, although it is of course the disposition to shatter into some number or other of pieces, the exact number being left indeterminate.
Conclusion and Metaphilosophical Upshot
And so it might be like this: nature in itself is animated by an intrinsic immanent teleology or intentionality below the level of conscious mind, an intrinsic (as opposed to derivative) purposiveness which is present in nature all along, but which becomes conscious only in us. This intrinsic and ubiquitous pre-conscious teleology or purposiveness suffices to ground the cognitive reliability of our faculties, and in such a way as to make it rational for us to trust their deliverances. For on this scheme, there is nothing fluky or accidental about mind. Mind is king and it is there all along. And this without any assistance ab extra from God, and of course without any constructive 'worldmaking' nonsense of the Goodmanian sort. (Allusion to Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking). We also avoid the eliminativist Unsinn of Daniel Dennett the scientistic sophist.
I am limning the metaphysical scheme presented by Thomas Nagel in his Mind and Cosmos, an overview of which you will find at my Substack site.
Nagel's panpsychist immanentism no doubt has it own flaws, as any decent aporetician ought to suspect. But Nagel's proposal does challenge any quick acquiescence in the design argument for God sketched above.
And so I come around once again to my oft-made meta-philosophical claim that in these metaphysical and theological precincts (and not just here) there are no 'knock-down' arguments, no arguments that are rationally compelling (rationally coercive, rationally inescapable, philosophically dispositive, pick your favorite phrase).
Let the dogmatists howl.
The dogs bark, the caravan passes: it ürür, kervan yürür.
Along the Silk Road, headed East.
An overview. Substack latest.
Stay calm. Take some deep breaths. Be careful what you say. Quietly prepare.
If you are a Democrat, ask yourself whether Joe Biden's open-border policy might have something to do with a breakdown in civil order, and who will profit from such a breakdown.
Rod Dreher's take.
Victor Davis Hanson on Assassination Porn and the Sickness on the Left. It is this sort of thing that Hanson has in mind.
Jonathan Turley weighs in, making a point Dmitri made in the combox.
This image by Evan Vucci of the AP is quickly becoming an iconic one. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Donald Trump, his face bloodied by a bullet, raised a fist and said, "Fight! fight! fight!" on Saturday as Secret Service agents helped him from his rally stage. In doing so, he "struck one of the iconic poses in US history," writes Nico Hines at the Daily Beast. The sentiment is a common one:
"Make no mistake, the image of a bloodstained Trump standing with one arm aloft instantly takes its place alongside the greatest photos in American history," writes Hines, up there with Neil Armstrong on the moon and the Times Square kiss. In his view, the moment is historic in part because it all but seals Trump's victory in November. [A naive prediction which shows a failure to grasp just how vicious and vile the cadre Left is. There will be further attempts to stop him, either by assassination or by some other means. As a defender of the American republic, Trump stands in the way of the Left's relentless effort to "fundamentally transform" (Obama) our country. It's a war over the soul of America. If you don't see that, you are a fool, whence it follows that Milquetoast Mitt and the nattering nabobs of his ilk are fools living in the past — to put it charitably. Time to ask yourself a serious question: Which side am I on? If you give the Right answer to that question, then you must ask yourself: what will I do to help insure that the Right side wins?]
Mose Allison, The Song is Ended
Punch Bros., Dink's Song
Dave van Ronk, Dink's Song
Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song
Fairport Convention, Percy's Song
Doors, Alabama Song
Roberta Flack, Killing Me Softly with his Song
Bob Dylan, Song to Woody
Chad and Jeremy, Summer Song
Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song
Brook Benton, The Boll Weevil Song
Rupert Holmes, The Pina Colada Song
Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Born in Chicago
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
I was born in Chicago in nineteen and forty one
Well my father told me
Son you had better get a gun.
True then, truer now.
And you still be ridin' with Biden? How stupid can you be? How self-destructive? How willfully self-enstupidated? And of course the scourge is not upon Chicago alone but upon every Dem-'controlled' city, county, state, and jurisdiction.
The humorous meme is now a reality: ammo vending machines are coming to stores. That's no joke.
I'm a staunch supporter of 2A rights, but this cannot be a good development. What's next? Ammo sales at drive-through liquor stores? "Would you like a box of ammo to go with your bottle of Hornitos tequila? Today's special is Federal 115 gr FMJ 9 mm hollow point."
To vote Democrat is to vote for more crime and the defunding of professional law enforcement The more crime, the more the burden of personal defense is placed on the citizen. But the average citizen is unlikely to get the proper training and to devote the time needed to become proficient in the use of firearms. The upshot is more accidental negligent discharges. In a well-functioning society, the laws are enforced and the criminal element is kept in check so that the citizen can go about his business without the need to, and the grave responsibility that comes with, 'packing heat.'
And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you?
Related: Shooting Up Chicago
Some political wit in the Alinskyite style is the Stack topper of the day.
The following has been languishing in my unpublished archives since December 2009. Time to clean it up and send it out. If it triggers a bit of hard thinking in a few receptive heads, and therewith, the momentary bliss of the sublunary bios theoretikos, then it has done its job.
Don't comment unless you understand the subject-matter.
…………………………
Many contemporary philosophers are not familiar with talk of modes of being. So let me try to make this notion clear. I will use 'being' and existence' interchangeably in this entry. I begin by distinguishing four questions:
Q1. What is meant by 'mode of being'?
Q2. Is the corresponding idea intelligible?
Q3. Are there (two or more) modes of being?
Q4. What are the modes of being?
My present concern is with the first two questions only. Clearly, the first two questions are logically prior to the second two. It is possible to understand what is meant by 'mode of being' and grant that the notion is intelligible while denying that there are (two or more) modes of being. And if two philosophers agree that there are (two or more) modes of being, they might yet disagree about what these modes are.
With respect to anything at all, we can ask the following different and seemingly intelligible questions. What is it? Does it exist? How (in what way or mode) does it exist? This yields a tripartite distinction between quiddity (in a broad sense to include essential and accidental, relational and nonrelational properties), existence, and mode of existence. There is also a fourth question, the Why question: why does anything at all, or any particular thing, exist? The Why question is not on today's agenda.
My claim is that the notion that there are modes of being is intelligible, not that it is unavoidable. But we might decide that the costs of avoiding it are prohibitively high. 'Intelligible' means understandable.
What might motivate a MOB (modes-of-being) doctrine? I will sketch two possible motivations.
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.