Existence
Encyclopedia
In common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our sense
s, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy
the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence
, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity
conditions for objects and properties. Philosophers investigate questions such as "What exists?", "How do we know?", "To what extent are the senses a reliable guide to existence?", and "What is the meaning, if any, of assertions of the existence of categories
, idea
s, and abstraction
s?"
Ontology
is the philosophical study of the nature of being
, existence or reality
in general, as well as of the basic categories of being
and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics
, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy
, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. A lively debate continues about the existence of God
.
Epistemology studies criteria of truth
, defining "primary truths" inherently accepted in the investigation of knowledge. The first is existence. It is inherent in every analysis. Its self-evident
, a priori nature cannot be consistently doubted, since a person objecting to existence according to some standard of proof must implicitly accept the standard's existence as a premise.
Materialism
holds that the only thing that exists is matter
, that all things are composed of material, and all phenomena (including consciousness
) are the result of material interactions.
Life
is a characteristic that distinguishes object
s that have self-sustaining biological process
es that exist from those that do not
—either because such functions have ceased (death
), or else because they lack such functions and are classified as "inanimate".
word existere meaning "to appear", "to arise", "to become", or "to be", but literally, it means "to stand out" (ex- being the Latin prefix for "out" added to the Latin verb stare, meaning "to stand").
tradition of philosophy, the first comprehensive treatments of the subject are from Plato
's Phaedo
, Republic, and Statesman and Aristotle
's Metaphysics
, though earlier fragmentary writing exists. Aristotle developed a complicated theory of being, according to which only individual things, called substances, fully have being, but other things such as relations, quantity, time, and place (called the categories
) have a derivative kind of being, dependent on individual things. In Aristotle's Metaphysics, there are four causes
of existence or change in nature: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause.
The Neo-Platonists and some early Christian
philosophers argued about whether existence had any reality except in the mind of God. Some taught that existence was a snare and a delusion, that the world, the flesh, and the devil existed only to tempt weak humankind away from God.
The medieval philosopher
Thomas Aquinas
, perhaps following the Islamic philosopher
Avicenna
, argued that God is pure being, and that in God essence
and existence are the same. At about the same time, the nominalist philosopher William of Ockham
argued, in Book I of his Summa Totius Logicae
(Treatise on all Logic, written some time before 1327), that Categories are not a form of Being in their own right, but derivative on the existence of individuals.
treatment of the subject derives from Antoine Arnauld
and Pierre Nicole
's Logic, or The Art of Thinking, better known as the Port-Royal Logic
, first published in 1662. Arnauld thought that a proposition
or judgment
consists of taking two different ideas and either putting them together or rejecting them:
The two terms are joined by the verb "is" (or "is not", if the predicate is denied of the subject). Thus every proposition has three components: the two terms, and the "copula" that connects or separates them. Even when the proposition has only two words, the three terms are still there. For example "God loves humanity", really means "God is a lover of humanity", "God exists" means "God is a thing".
This theory of judgment dominated logic for centuries, but it has some obvious difficulties: it only considers proposition of the form "All A are B.", a form logicians call universal. It does not allow propositions of the form "Some A are B", a form logicians call existential. If neither A nor B includes the idea of existence, then "some A are B" simply adjoins A to B. Conversely, if A or B do include the idea of existence in the way that "triangle" contains the idea "three angles equal to two right angles", then "A exists" is automatically true, and we have an ontological proof of A's existence. (Indeed Arnauld's contemporary Descartes famously argued so, regarding the concept "God" (discourse 4, Meditation 5)). Arnauld's theory was current until the middle of the nineteenth century.
David Hume
argued that the claim that a thing exists, when added to our notion of a thing, does not add anything to the concept. For example, if we form a complete notion of Moses, and superadd to that notion the claim that Moses existed, we are not adding anything to the notion of Moses.
Kant
also argued that existence is not a "real" predicate, but gave no explanation of how this is possible. Indeed, his famous discussion of the subject is merely a restatement of Arnauld's doctrine that in the proposition "God is omnipotent", the verb "is" signifies the joining or separating of two concepts such as "God" and "omnipotence".
Schopenhauer
claimed that “everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation.” According to him there can be "No object without subject" because "everything objective is already conditioned as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms…"
(and also Kant's pupil Herbart
) argued that the predicative nature of existence was proved by sentences like "A centaur is a poetic fiction" or "A greatest number is impossible" (Herbart). Franz Brentano
challenged this; so also (as is better known) did Frege
. Brentano argued that we can join the concept represented by a noun phrase "an A" to the concept represented by an adjective "B" to give the concept represented by the noun phrase "a B-A". For example, we can join "a man" to "wise" to give "a wise man". But the noun phrase "a wise man" is not a sentence, whereas "some man is wise" is a sentence. Hence the copula must do more than merely join or separate concepts. Furthermore, adding "exists" to "a wise man", to give the complete sentence "a wise man exists" has the same effect as joining "some man" to "wise" using the copula. So the copula has the same effect as "exists". Brentano argued that every categorical proposition can be translated into an existential one without change in meaning and that the "exists" and "does not exist" of the existential proposition take the place of the copula. He showed this by the following examples:
Frege developed a similar view (though later) in his great work The Foundations of Arithmetic
, as did Charles Sanders Peirce (but Peirce held that the possible and the real are not limited to the actually, individually existent). The Frege-Brentano view is the basis of the dominant position in modern Anglo-American philosophy
: that existence is asserted by the existential quantifier (as expressed by Quine
's slogan "To be is to be the value of a variable." — On What There Is, 1948).
, there are two quantifiers, "some" and "all", though as Brentano
(1838–1917) pointed out, we can make do with just one quantifier and negation. The first of these quantifiers, "some". is also expressed as "there exists". Thus, in the sentence "There exists a man", the term "man" is asserted to be part of existence. But we can also assert, "There exists a triangle." Is a "triangle" — an abstract idea — part of existence in the same way that a "man" — a physical body — is part of existence? Do abstractions such as goodness, blindness, and virtue exist in the same sense that chairs, tables, and houses exist? What categories
, or kinds of thing, can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition?
Worse, does "existence" exist?
In some statements, existence is implied without being mentioned. The statement "A bridge crosses the Thames at Hammersmith" cannot just be about a bridge, the Thames, and Hammersmith. It must be about "existence" as well. On the other hand, the statement "A bridge crosses the Styx at Limbo" has the same form, but while in the first case we understand a real bridge in the real world made of stone or brick, what "existence" would mean in the second case is less clear.
The nominalist approach is to argue that certain noun phrases can be "eliminated" by rewriting a sentence in a form that has the same meaning, but does not contain the noun phrase. Thus Ockham
argued that "Socrates has wisdom", which apparently asserts the existence of a reference for "wisdom", can be rewritten as "Socrates is wise", which contains only the referring phrase "Socrates". This method became widely accepted in the twentieth century by the analytic school
of philosophy.
However, this argument may be inverted by realists
in arguing that since the sentence "Socrates is wise" can be rewritten as "Socrates has wisdom", this proves the existence of a hidden referent for "wise".
A further problem is that human beings seem to process information about fictional characters
in much the same way that they process information about real people. For example, in the 2008 United States presidential election, a politician and actor named Fred Thompson ran for the Republican Party
nomination. In polls, potential voters identified Fred Thompson as a "law and order" candidate. Thompson plays a fictional character on the television series Law and Order
. Doubtless the people who make the comment are aware that Law and Order is fiction, but at some level, they process fiction as if it were fact. Another example of this is the common experience of actresses who play the villain in a soap opera being accosted in public as if they are to blame for the actions of the characters they play.
A scientist might make a clear distinction about objects that exist, and assert that all objects that exist are made up of either matter or energy. But in the layperson's worldview, existence includes real, fictional, and even contradictory objects. Thus if we reason from the statement "Pegasus
flies" to the statement "Pegasus exists", we are not asserting that Pegasus is made up of atoms, but rather that Pegasus exists in a particular worldview, the worldview of classical myth. When a mathematicians reasons from the statement "ABC is a triangle" to the statement "triangles exist", she is not asserting that triangles are made up of atoms but rather that triangles exist within a particular mathematical model
.
's Theory of Descriptions
, the negation operator in a singular sentence can take either wide or narrow scope: we distinguish between "some S is not P" (where negation takes "narrow scope") and "it is not the case that 'some S is P'" (where negation takes "wide scope"). The problem with this view is that there appears to be no such scope distinction in the case of proper names. The sentences "Socrates is not bald" and "it is not the case that Socrates is bald" both appear to have the same meaning, and they both appear to assert or presuppose the existence of someone (Socrates) who is not bald, so that negation takes narrow scope.
The theory of descriptions has generally fallen into disrepute, though there have been recent attempts to revive it by Stephen Neale
and Frank Jackson
. According to the direct-reference view, an early version of which was originally proposed by Bertrand Russell
, and perhaps earlier by Gottlob Frege
, a proper name strictly has no meaning when there is no object to which it refers. This view relies on the argument that the semantic function of a proper name is to tell us which object bears the name, and thus to identify some object. But no object can be identified if none exists. Thus, a proper name must have a bearer if it is to be meaningful.
, existential statements fall into two classes.
The problem is then evaded as follows. "Pegasus flies" implies existence in the wide sense, for it implies that something flies. But it does not imply existence in the narrow sense, for we deny existence in this sense by saying that Pegasus does not exist. In effect, the world of all things divides, on this view, into those (like Socrates
, the planet Venus
, and New York City) that have existence in the narrow sense, and those (like Sherlock Holmes
, the goddess Venus
, and Minas Tirith
) that do not.
However, common sense suggests the non-existence of such things as fictional characters
or places.
, and by Edmund Husserl
, Germanophone and Francophone philosophy took a different direction regarding the question of existence.
is the view of idealists who are skeptics about the physical world, maintaining either: 1) that nothing exists outside the mind
, or 2) that we would have no access to a mind-independent reality even if it may exist. Realists, in contrast, hold that perceptions or sense data
are caused by mind-independent objects. An "anti-realist" who denies that other minds exist (i. e., a solipsist) is different from an "anti-realist" who claims that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are unobservable other minds (i. e., a logical behaviorist).
school of Mahāyāna
Buddhism.
In eastern philosophy, Anicca (Sanskrit anitya) or "impermanence
" describes existence. It refers to the fact that all conditioned things (sankhara
) are in a constant state of flux. In reality there is no thing that ultimately ceases to exist; only the appearance of a thing ceases as it changes from one form to another. Imagine a leaf that falls to the ground and decomposes. While the appearance and relative existence of the leaf ceases, the components that formed the leaf become particulate material that goes on to form new plants. Buddhism teaches a middle way, avoiding the extreme views of eternalism
and nihilism
. The middle way recognizes there are vast differences between the way things are perceived to exist and the way things really exist. The differences are reconciled in the concept of Shunyata
by addressing the existing object's served purpose for the subject's identity in being. What exists is in non-existence, because the subject changes.
Trailokya
elaborates on three kinds of existence, those of desire, form, and formlessness in which there are karmic rebirths. Taken further to the Trikaya
doctrine, it describes how the Buddha exists. In this philosophy, it is accepted that the Buddha exists in more than one absolute way.
Sense
Senses are physiological capacities of organisms that provide inputs for perception. The senses and their operation, classification, and theory are overlapping topics studied by a variety of fields, most notably neuroscience, cognitive psychology , and philosophy of perception...
s, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence
Essence
In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without...
, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity
Identity (philosophy)
In philosophy, identity, from , is the relation each thing bears just to itself. According to Leibniz's law two things sharing every attribute are not only similar, but are the same thing. The concept of sameness has given rise to the general concept of identity, as in personal identity and...
conditions for objects and properties. Philosophers investigate questions such as "What exists?", "How do we know?", "To what extent are the senses a reliable guide to existence?", and "What is the meaning, if any, of assertions of the existence of categories
Categorization
Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge...
, idea
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
s, and abstraction
Abstraction
Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
s?"
Ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
is the philosophical study of the nature of being
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
, existence or reality
Reality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
in general, as well as of the basic categories of being
Category of being
In metaphysics , the different kinds or ways of being are called categories of being or simply categories. To investigate the categories of being is to determine the most fundamental and the broadest classes of entities...
and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy
Hierarchy
A hierarchy is an arrangement of items in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another...
, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. A lively debate continues about the existence of God
Existence of God
Arguments for and against the existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others. In philosophical terms, arguments for and against the existence of God involve primarily the sub-disciplines of epistemology and ontology , but also of the theory of value, since...
.
Epistemology studies criteria of truth
Criteria of truth
In epistemology, criteria of truth are standards and rules used to judge the accuracy of statements and claims. They are tools of verification. Understanding a philosophy's criteria of truth is fundamental to a clear evaluation of that philosophy. This necessity is driven by the varying, and...
, defining "primary truths" inherently accepted in the investigation of knowledge. The first is existence. It is inherent in every analysis. Its self-evident
Self-evidence
In epistemology , a self-evident proposition is one that is known to be true by understanding its meaning without proof....
, a priori nature cannot be consistently doubted, since a person objecting to existence according to some standard of proof must implicitly accept the standard's existence as a premise.
Materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
holds that the only thing that exists is matter
Matter
Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
, that all things are composed of material, and all phenomena (including consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
) are the result of material interactions.
Life
Life
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate...
is a characteristic that distinguishes object
Object (philosophy)
An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
s that have self-sustaining biological process
Biological process
A biological process is a process of a living organism. Biological processes are made up of any number of chemical reactions or other events that results in a transformation....
es that exist from those that do not
—either because such functions have ceased (death
Death
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....
), or else because they lack such functions and are classified as "inanimate".
Etymology
The word "existence" comes from the LatinLatin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
word existere meaning "to appear", "to arise", "to become", or "to be", but literally, it means "to stand out" (ex- being the Latin prefix for "out" added to the Latin verb stare, meaning "to stand").
Historical conceptions
In the WesternWestern world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
tradition of philosophy, the first comprehensive treatments of the subject are from Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's Phaedo
Phaedo
Plato's Phaedo is one of the great dialogues of his middle period, along with the Republic and the Symposium. The Phaedo, which depicts the death of Socrates, is also Plato's seventh and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days .In the dialogue, Socrates...
, Republic, and Statesman and Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
's Metaphysics
Metaphysics (Aristotle)
Metaphysics is one of the principal works of Aristotle and the first major work of the branch of philosophy with the same name. The principal subject is "being qua being", or being understood as being. It examines what can be asserted about anything that exists just because of its existence and...
, though earlier fragmentary writing exists. Aristotle developed a complicated theory of being, according to which only individual things, called substances, fully have being, but other things such as relations, quantity, time, and place (called the categories
Categories (Aristotle)
The Categories is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of thing that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition...
) have a derivative kind of being, dependent on individual things. In Aristotle's Metaphysics, there are four causes
Four causes
Four Causes refers to a principle in Aristotelian science that is used to understand change. Aristotle described four different types of causes, or ways in which an object could be explained: "we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause", He argued...
of existence or change in nature: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the final cause.
The Neo-Platonists and some early Christian
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
philosophers argued about whether existence had any reality except in the mind of God. Some taught that existence was a snare and a delusion, that the world, the flesh, and the devil existed only to tempt weak humankind away from God.
The medieval philosopher
Medieval philosophy
Medieval philosophy is the philosophy in the era now known as medieval or the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD to the Renaissance in the sixteenth century...
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
, perhaps following the Islamic philosopher
Early Islamic philosophy
Early Islamic philosophy or classical Islamic philosophy is a period of intense philosophical development beginning in the 2nd century AH of the Islamic calendar and lasting until the 6th century AH...
Avicenna
Avicenna
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā , commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian polymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived...
, argued that God is pure being, and that in God essence
Essence
In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without...
and existence are the same. At about the same time, the nominalist philosopher William of Ockham
William of Ockham
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of...
argued, in Book I of his Summa Totius Logicae
Sum of Logic
The Summa Logicae is a textbook on logic by William of Ockham. It was written around 1323.Systematically, it resembles other works of medieval logic, organised under the basic headings of the Aristotelian Predicables, Categories, terms, propositions, and syllogisms...
(Treatise on all Logic, written some time before 1327), that Categories are not a form of Being in their own right, but derivative on the existence of individuals.
Early modern philosophy
The early modernEarly modern Europe
Early modern Europe is the term used by historians to refer to a period in the history of Europe which spanned the centuries between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, roughly the late 15th century to the late 18th century...
treatment of the subject derives from Antoine Arnauld
Antoine Arnauld
Antoine Arnauld — le Grand as contemporaries called him, to distinguish him from his father — was a French Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and mathematician...
and Pierre Nicole
Pierre Nicole
Pierre Nicole was one of the most distinguished of the French Jansenists.Born in Chartres, he was the son of a provincial barrister, who took in charge his education...
's Logic, or The Art of Thinking, better known as the Port-Royal Logic
Port-Royal Logic
Port-Royal Logic, or Logique de Port-Royal, is the common name of La logique, ou l'art de penser, an important textbook on logic first published anonymously in 1662 by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, two prominent members of the Jansenist movement, centered around Port-Royal. Blaise Pascal...
, first published in 1662. Arnauld thought that a proposition
Proposition
In logic and philosophy, the term proposition refers to either the "content" or "meaning" of a meaningful declarative sentence or the pattern of symbols, marks, or sounds that make up a meaningful declarative sentence...
or judgment
Decision making
Decision making can be regarded as the mental processes resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternative scenarios. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.- Overview :Human performance in decision terms...
consists of taking two different ideas and either putting them together or rejecting them:
The two terms are joined by the verb "is" (or "is not", if the predicate is denied of the subject). Thus every proposition has three components: the two terms, and the "copula" that connects or separates them. Even when the proposition has only two words, the three terms are still there. For example "God loves humanity", really means "God is a lover of humanity", "God exists" means "God is a thing".
This theory of judgment dominated logic for centuries, but it has some obvious difficulties: it only considers proposition of the form "All A are B.", a form logicians call universal. It does not allow propositions of the form "Some A are B", a form logicians call existential. If neither A nor B includes the idea of existence, then "some A are B" simply adjoins A to B. Conversely, if A or B do include the idea of existence in the way that "triangle" contains the idea "three angles equal to two right angles", then "A exists" is automatically true, and we have an ontological proof of A's existence. (Indeed Arnauld's contemporary Descartes famously argued so, regarding the concept "God" (discourse 4, Meditation 5)). Arnauld's theory was current until the middle of the nineteenth century.
David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
argued that the claim that a thing exists, when added to our notion of a thing, does not add anything to the concept. For example, if we form a complete notion of Moses, and superadd to that notion the claim that Moses existed, we are not adding anything to the notion of Moses.
Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
also argued that existence is not a "real" predicate, but gave no explanation of how this is possible. Indeed, his famous discussion of the subject is merely a restatement of Arnauld's doctrine that in the proposition "God is omnipotent", the verb "is" signifies the joining or separating of two concepts such as "God" and "omnipotence".
Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
claimed that “everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation.” According to him there can be "No object without subject" because "everything objective is already conditioned as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms…"
Predicative nature
John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
(and also Kant's pupil Herbart
Johann Friedrich Herbart
Johann Friedrich Herbart was a German philosopher, psychologist, and founder of pedagogy as an academic discipline....
) argued that the predicative nature of existence was proved by sentences like "A centaur is a poetic fiction" or "A greatest number is impossible" (Herbart). Franz Brentano
Franz Brentano
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...
challenged this; so also (as is better known) did Frege
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
. Brentano argued that we can join the concept represented by a noun phrase "an A" to the concept represented by an adjective "B" to give the concept represented by the noun phrase "a B-A". For example, we can join "a man" to "wise" to give "a wise man". But the noun phrase "a wise man" is not a sentence, whereas "some man is wise" is a sentence. Hence the copula must do more than merely join or separate concepts. Furthermore, adding "exists" to "a wise man", to give the complete sentence "a wise man exists" has the same effect as joining "some man" to "wise" using the copula. So the copula has the same effect as "exists". Brentano argued that every categorical proposition can be translated into an existential one without change in meaning and that the "exists" and "does not exist" of the existential proposition take the place of the copula. He showed this by the following examples:
- The categorical proposition "Some man is sick" has the same meaning as the existential proposition "A sick man exists" or "There is a sick man".
- The categorical proposition "No stone is living" has the same meaning as the existential proposition "A living stone does not exist" or "there is no living stone".
- The categorical proposition "All men are mortal" has the same meaning as the existential proposition "An immortal man does not exist" or "there is no immortal man".
- The categorical proposition "Some man is not learned" has the same meaning as the existential proposition "A non-learned man exists" or "there is a non-learned man".
Frege developed a similar view (though later) in his great work The Foundations of Arithmetic
The Foundations of Arithmetic
Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik is a book by Gottlob Frege, published in 1884, in which he investigates the philosophical foundations of arithmetic. In a tour de force of literary and philosophical merit, Frege demolished other theories of number and developed his own theory of numbers...
, as did Charles Sanders Peirce (but Peirce held that the possible and the real are not limited to the actually, individually existent). The Frege-Brentano view is the basis of the dominant position in modern Anglo-American philosophy
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
: that existence is asserted by the existential quantifier (as expressed by Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition...
's slogan "To be is to be the value of a variable." — On What There Is, 1948).
Semantics
In mathematical logicMathematical logic
Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to foundations of mathematics, theoretical computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics...
, there are two quantifiers, "some" and "all", though as Brentano
Franz Brentano
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.-Life:Brentano was born at Marienberg am...
(1838–1917) pointed out, we can make do with just one quantifier and negation. The first of these quantifiers, "some". is also expressed as "there exists". Thus, in the sentence "There exists a man", the term "man" is asserted to be part of existence. But we can also assert, "There exists a triangle." Is a "triangle" — an abstract idea — part of existence in the same way that a "man" — a physical body — is part of existence? Do abstractions such as goodness, blindness, and virtue exist in the same sense that chairs, tables, and houses exist? What categories
Categories (Aristotle)
The Categories is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of thing that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition...
, or kinds of thing, can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition?
Worse, does "existence" exist?
In some statements, existence is implied without being mentioned. The statement "A bridge crosses the Thames at Hammersmith" cannot just be about a bridge, the Thames, and Hammersmith. It must be about "existence" as well. On the other hand, the statement "A bridge crosses the Styx at Limbo" has the same form, but while in the first case we understand a real bridge in the real world made of stone or brick, what "existence" would mean in the second case is less clear.
The nominalist approach is to argue that certain noun phrases can be "eliminated" by rewriting a sentence in a form that has the same meaning, but does not contain the noun phrase. Thus Ockham
William of Ockham
William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of...
argued that "Socrates has wisdom", which apparently asserts the existence of a reference for "wisdom", can be rewritten as "Socrates is wise", which contains only the referring phrase "Socrates". This method became widely accepted in the twentieth century by the analytic school
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
of philosophy.
However, this argument may be inverted by realists
Philosophical realism
Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc....
in arguing that since the sentence "Socrates is wise" can be rewritten as "Socrates has wisdom", this proves the existence of a hidden referent for "wise".
A further problem is that human beings seem to process information about fictional characters
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
in much the same way that they process information about real people. For example, in the 2008 United States presidential election, a politician and actor named Fred Thompson ran for the Republican Party
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
nomination. In polls, potential voters identified Fred Thompson as a "law and order" candidate. Thompson plays a fictional character on the television series Law and Order
Law & Order franchise
The Law & Order franchise is a number of related American television series created by Dick Wolf and originally broadcast on NBC, all of which deal with some aspect of the criminal justice system...
. Doubtless the people who make the comment are aware that Law and Order is fiction, but at some level, they process fiction as if it were fact. Another example of this is the common experience of actresses who play the villain in a soap opera being accosted in public as if they are to blame for the actions of the characters they play.
A scientist might make a clear distinction about objects that exist, and assert that all objects that exist are made up of either matter or energy. But in the layperson's worldview, existence includes real, fictional, and even contradictory objects. Thus if we reason from the statement "Pegasus
Pegasus
Pegasus is one of the best known fantastical as well as mythological creatures in Greek mythology. He is a winged divine horse, usually white in color. He was sired by Poseidon, in his role as horse-god, and foaled by the Gorgon Medusa. He was the brother of Chrysaor, born at a single birthing...
flies" to the statement "Pegasus exists", we are not asserting that Pegasus is made up of atoms, but rather that Pegasus exists in a particular worldview, the worldview of classical myth. When a mathematicians reasons from the statement "ABC is a triangle" to the statement "triangles exist", she is not asserting that triangles are made up of atoms but rather that triangles exist within a particular mathematical model
Mathematical model
A mathematical model is a description of a system using mathematical concepts and language. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed mathematical modeling. Mathematical models are used not only in the natural sciences and engineering disciplines A mathematical model is a...
.
Modern approaches
According to Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
's Theory of Descriptions
Theory of descriptions
The theory of descriptions is the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language. It is also known as Russell's Theory of Descriptions...
, the negation operator in a singular sentence can take either wide or narrow scope: we distinguish between "some S is not P" (where negation takes "narrow scope") and "it is not the case that 'some S is P'" (where negation takes "wide scope"). The problem with this view is that there appears to be no such scope distinction in the case of proper names. The sentences "Socrates is not bald" and "it is not the case that Socrates is bald" both appear to have the same meaning, and they both appear to assert or presuppose the existence of someone (Socrates) who is not bald, so that negation takes narrow scope.
The theory of descriptions has generally fallen into disrepute, though there have been recent attempts to revive it by Stephen Neale
Stephen Neale
Stephen Roy Albert Neale is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York...
and Frank Jackson
Frank Cameron Jackson
Frank Cameron Jackson is an Australian philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor and former Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University. In 2007-2008, he also became a regular visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton University...
. According to the direct-reference view, an early version of which was originally proposed by Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
, and perhaps earlier by Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
, a proper name strictly has no meaning when there is no object to which it refers. This view relies on the argument that the semantic function of a proper name is to tell us which object bears the name, and thus to identify some object. But no object can be identified if none exists. Thus, a proper name must have a bearer if it is to be meaningful.
Existence in the wide and narrow senses
According to the "two sense" view of existence, which derives from Alexius MeinongAlexius Meinong
Alexius Meinong was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology...
, existential statements fall into two classes.
- Those asserting existence in a wide sense. These are typically of the form "N is P" for singular N, or "some S is P".
- Those asserting existence in a narrow sense. These are typically of the form "N exists" or "Ss exist".
The problem is then evaded as follows. "Pegasus flies" implies existence in the wide sense, for it implies that something flies. But it does not imply existence in the narrow sense, for we deny existence in this sense by saying that Pegasus does not exist. In effect, the world of all things divides, on this view, into those (like Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
, the planet Venus
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
, and New York City) that have existence in the narrow sense, and those (like Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
, the goddess Venus
Venus (mythology)
Venus is a Roman goddess principally associated with love, beauty, sex,sexual seduction and fertility, who played a key role in many Roman religious festivals and myths...
, and Minas Tirith
Minas Tirith
Minas Tirith , originally named Minas Anor, is a fictional city and castle in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings. It became the heavily fortified capital of Gondor in the second half of the Third Age...
) that do not.
However, common sense suggests the non-existence of such things as fictional characters
Character (arts)
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
or places.
European views
Influenced by the views of Brentano's pupil Alexius MeinongAlexius Meinong
Alexius Meinong was an Austrian philosopher, a realist known for his unique ontology...
, and by Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, Germanophone and Francophone philosophy took a different direction regarding the question of existence.
Anti-realist arguments
Anti-realismAnti-realism
In analytic philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification-transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true or false...
is the view of idealists who are skeptics about the physical world, maintaining either: 1) that nothing exists outside the mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
, or 2) that we would have no access to a mind-independent reality even if it may exist. Realists, in contrast, hold that perceptions or sense data
Sense data
In the philosophy of perception, the theory of sense data was a popular view held the early 20th century by philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, H. H. Price, A.J. Ayer and G.E. Moore, among others. Sense data are supposedly mind-dependent objects whose existence and properties are...
are caused by mind-independent objects. An "anti-realist" who denies that other minds exist (i. e., a solipsist) is different from an "anti-realist" who claims that there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not there are unobservable other minds (i. e., a logical behaviorist).
Dharmic "middle way" view
The Indian philosopher Nagarjuna (c. 150 - 250 CE) largely advanced existence concepts and founded the MadhyamakaMadhyamaka
Madhyamaka refers primarily to a Mahāyāna Buddhist school of Buddhist philosophy systematized by Nāgārjuna. Nāgārjuna may have arrived at his positions from a desire to achieve a consistent exegesis of the Buddha's doctrine as recorded in the āgamas...
school of Mahāyāna
Mahayana
Mahāyāna is one of the two main existing branches of Buddhism and a term for classification of Buddhist philosophies and practice...
Buddhism.
In eastern philosophy, Anicca (Sanskrit anitya) or "impermanence
Impermanence
Impermanence is one of the essential doctrines or three marks of existence in Buddhism...
" describes existence. It refers to the fact that all conditioned things (sankhara
Sankhara
' or ' is a term figuring prominently in the teaching of the Buddha. The word means "that which has been put together" and "that which puts together". In the first sense, refers to conditioned phenomena generally but specifically to all mental "dispositions"...
) are in a constant state of flux. In reality there is no thing that ultimately ceases to exist; only the appearance of a thing ceases as it changes from one form to another. Imagine a leaf that falls to the ground and decomposes. While the appearance and relative existence of the leaf ceases, the components that formed the leaf become particulate material that goes on to form new plants. Buddhism teaches a middle way, avoiding the extreme views of eternalism
Eternalism
The word eternalism has at least three meanings:* In philosophy, Eternalism is a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all points in time are equally "real", as opposed to the presentist idea that only the present is real.*Eternalism is a position in...
and nihilism
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
. The middle way recognizes there are vast differences between the way things are perceived to exist and the way things really exist. The differences are reconciled in the concept of Shunyata
Shunyata
Śūnyatā, शून्यता , Suññatā , stong-pa nyid , Kòng/Kū, 空 , Gong-seong, 공성 , qoγusun is frequently translated into English as emptiness...
by addressing the existing object's served purpose for the subject's identity in being. What exists is in non-existence, because the subject changes.
Trailokya
Trailõkya
Trailokya has been translated as "three worlds," "three spheres," "three planes of existence," "three realms" and "three regions."...
elaborates on three kinds of existence, those of desire, form, and formlessness in which there are karmic rebirths. Taken further to the Trikaya
Trikaya
The Trikāya doctrine is an important Mahayana Buddhist teaching on both the nature of reality and the nature of a Buddha. By the 4th century CE the Trikāya Doctrine had assumed the form that we now know...
doctrine, it describes how the Buddha exists. In this philosophy, it is accepted that the Buddha exists in more than one absolute way.
See also
- BeingBeingBeing , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
- Cogito ergo sumCogito ergo sumis a philosophical Latin statement proposed by . The simple meaning of the phrase is that someone wondering whether or not they exist is, in and of itself, proof that something, an "I", exists to do the thinking — However this "I" is not the more or less permanent person we call "I"...
- Conservation lawConservation lawIn physics, a conservation law states that a particular measurable property of an isolated physical system does not change as the system evolves....
- CosmogonyCosmogonyCosmogony, or cosmogeny, is any scientific theory concerning the coming into existence or origin of the universe, or about how reality came to be. The word comes from the Greek κοσμογονία , from κόσμος "cosmos, the world", and the root of γίνομαι / γέγονα "to be born, come about"...
- Cosmological argumentCosmological argumentThe cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of a First Cause to the universe, and by extension is often used as an argument for the existence of an "unconditioned" or "supreme" being, usually then identified as God...
- Existence precedes essenceExistence precedes essenceThe proposition that existence precedes essence is a central claim of existentialism, which reverses the traditional philosophical view that the essence or nature of a thing is more fundamental and immutable than its existence...
- Existence theoremExistence theoremIn mathematics, an existence theorem is a theorem with a statement beginning 'there exist ..', or more generally 'for all x, y, ... there exist ...'. That is, in more formal terms of symbolic logic, it is a theorem with a statement involving the existential quantifier. Many such theorems will not...
- ExistentialismExistentialismExistentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
- Existential operator
- Gödel's ontological proofGödel's ontological proofGödel's ontological proof is a formal argument for God's existence by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. It is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury. St. Anselm's ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: "God, by definition, is that for which no...
- Gaunilo of MarmoutiersGaunilo of MarmoutiersGaunilo of Marmoutiers was an 11th-century Benedictine monk, best known for his criticism of St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God. His thesis On Behalf of the Fool takes its name from the fools mentioned in Psalms 14:1 and Psalms 53:1, who say in their hearts that there is no...
- Identity and changeIdentity and changeThe relationship between identity and change in the philosophical field of metaphysics seems, at first glance, deceptively simple, and belies the complexity of the issues involved. This article explores "the problem of change and identity".- Change :...
- Meaning of life
- Performative contradictionPerformative contradictionA performative contradiction arises when the propositional content of a statement contradicts the presuppositions of asserting it. An example of a performative contradiction is the statement "this statement can't be asserted" because the very act of asserting it presupposes it can be...
- Right to existRight to existThe right to exist is said to be an attribute of nations. According to an essay by the nineteenth century French philosopher Ernest Renan, a state has the right to exist when individuals are willing to sacrifice their own interests for the community it represents. Unlike self-determination, the...
- SolipsismSolipsismSolipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from Latin solus and ipse . Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not...
- Three marks of existenceThree marks of existenceThe Three marks of existence, within Buddhism, are three characteristics shared by all sentient beings, namely: impermanence ; suffering or unsatisfactoriness ; non-self .According to Buddhist tradition, a full understanding of these three can bring an end to suffering...