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Originally conceived as a topic for one of my honours essays but worth pursuing in its own right I reckon.
Topic
During the twentieth century there has been much debate over whether existence should be regarding as a predicate or as a quantifier. I believe that the predicate view is correct but only in a trivial way - the predicate exists can be unpacked so as to remove all reference to existence and thus leave one with less controversial/problematic concepts. Furthermore, much confusion has arisen from the fact that the existence predicate is often not "packed" the same way.
_A potential idea_
Existence just comes down to the positing of relations between various classes of objects. types of relevant relations might include spatial, temporal, causal, instantial (i.e. particular to universal relationship), logical (independence or dependence), emotional and mental-subject dependencies.
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Next Steps
- Try not to think about it too much while churning through what needs to be done for assessment.
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Where I'm At
- Attempting to find a context in which to present my views that won't leave them "swinging in the breeze".
- Attempting to determine whether or not aspects of Hume, Aristotle and Kant are in tune with my idea. Also maybe Meinong and Routley/Sylvan, who think that existence is a predicate but not a normal one, and have a logic to deal with that. Jason
Anjan Notes
Existence Fodder
Read:
- Brian's chapters on existence and universals.
- MACKIE, PENELOPE (1998). Existence. In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved February 27, 2008, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/X013
- Miller, Barry, "Existence", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
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Questions
- How does the reification fallacy fit in here? That is, how does understanding a concept relate to the postulation that the objectification of that concept exists in some sense?
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Chris Wilcox