Brilliant and very creative article! I think this is the idea of St Thomas Aquinas’s _De Ente et Essentia_ argument, especially if you read it with Fr Barry Miller’s (with more analytical) rendering: that existence ultimately is the unlimited Pure Act but essence is the limitation — in your word, determination — which “bounds” existence into finite beings.
Fr Barry Miller also has an awesome rendering of why certain “explanatory series” cannot be infinite, and the one in the _De Ente_ argument is one of them.
"That which can be determined ... can only be determined, ultimately, by that which cannot be determined. The foundation of existence is already fully determinate. That is well and succinctly said. It is also obvious.
I would like to hear more on "Existence is not a predicate". I heard this first, many decades ago, from Anthony Flew in the Keele University Foundation Year Lectures. It did not convince me then, because in the sentence 'Things exist', 'exist' is clearly a predicate. No doubt there is more to it than this, starting with: existence is a predicate, but not like any other predicate.
One worry is that "existence" doesn't add anything to discriminate it from anything else. When you ascribe other properties, like red or blue, you say ascribe something that discriminates it from other things without those properties. But existence is not like that: everything exists.
I don't think that's a good objection, though. It just shows that existence is a universal attribute that everything has. There are others: self-existence, being in the world, being logically coherent, and so one. These attributes characterize everything. That doesn't mean they aren't attributes that can be ascribed to something.
One possible interpretation (due to Frege) goes something like this: suppose existence can be a predicate of individual objects. Naturally, when we say, for example, "Tom is F", we may infer that Tom must exist to possess property F, for any property F. But then what about "Tom doesn't exist"? He would have to exist to have the property of non-existence which is just plain contradictory. Frege's solution was to forgo existence as a first-order property of individual objects and interpret it as a second-order property of concepts. So to Frege, when we say "There are Fs", what we mean is that "there is at least one instance of the concept of F" and "Tom exists" just means "there is an instance of the concept of being identical to Tom".
Thanks for the replies, Joshua, Das. Those who say the existence is not a predicate seem to mean that it is not a property – or not a property of things.
I think it is right to talk here about the Transcendentals – being, identity, oneness, goodness, knowability, etc, - the properties that all things possess in virtue of having existence.
Existence discriminate married bachelors from tall trees.
We can even distinguish between different kinds of existence like what Saint Anselm does. Existence in the understanding (what is logically possible) and existence in reality (what is actual). Or what Saint Thomas Aquinas would distinguish between potency and act.
While Sherlock Holmes is a detective, he is not real. But unlike square circles, you can interact with Sherlock Holmes in a dream. So in a sense, I want to say that Sherlock Holmes is more real than a square circle, and that you are more real than Sherlock Holmes. And if we are characters in God's dream, then God may be more real than us.
You linked your recent grim reaper video as evidence for why you’ve come to think that infinite sequences are problematic even if they are grounded (I take this to mean even if every member is necessary). Is it just the grim reaper argument that motivates this?
Brilliant and very creative article! I think this is the idea of St Thomas Aquinas’s _De Ente et Essentia_ argument, especially if you read it with Fr Barry Miller’s (with more analytical) rendering: that existence ultimately is the unlimited Pure Act but essence is the limitation — in your word, determination — which “bounds” existence into finite beings.
Fr Barry Miller also has an awesome rendering of why certain “explanatory series” cannot be infinite, and the one in the _De Ente_ argument is one of them.
"That which can be determined ... can only be determined, ultimately, by that which cannot be determined. The foundation of existence is already fully determinate. That is well and succinctly said. It is also obvious.
I would like to hear more on "Existence is not a predicate". I heard this first, many decades ago, from Anthony Flew in the Keele University Foundation Year Lectures. It did not convince me then, because in the sentence 'Things exist', 'exist' is clearly a predicate. No doubt there is more to it than this, starting with: existence is a predicate, but not like any other predicate.
One worry is that "existence" doesn't add anything to discriminate it from anything else. When you ascribe other properties, like red or blue, you say ascribe something that discriminates it from other things without those properties. But existence is not like that: everything exists.
I don't think that's a good objection, though. It just shows that existence is a universal attribute that everything has. There are others: self-existence, being in the world, being logically coherent, and so one. These attributes characterize everything. That doesn't mean they aren't attributes that can be ascribed to something.
One possible interpretation (due to Frege) goes something like this: suppose existence can be a predicate of individual objects. Naturally, when we say, for example, "Tom is F", we may infer that Tom must exist to possess property F, for any property F. But then what about "Tom doesn't exist"? He would have to exist to have the property of non-existence which is just plain contradictory. Frege's solution was to forgo existence as a first-order property of individual objects and interpret it as a second-order property of concepts. So to Frege, when we say "There are Fs", what we mean is that "there is at least one instance of the concept of F" and "Tom exists" just means "there is an instance of the concept of being identical to Tom".
Good point. We could also say "non-existence" is a predicate that applies to nothing...
Thanks for the replies, Joshua, Das. Those who say the existence is not a predicate seem to mean that it is not a property – or not a property of things.
I think it is right to talk here about the Transcendentals – being, identity, oneness, goodness, knowability, etc, - the properties that all things possess in virtue of having existence.
What was that?
Existence discriminate married bachelors from tall trees.
We can even distinguish between different kinds of existence like what Saint Anselm does. Existence in the understanding (what is logically possible) and existence in reality (what is actual). Or what Saint Thomas Aquinas would distinguish between potency and act.
While Sherlock Holmes is a detective, he is not real. But unlike square circles, you can interact with Sherlock Holmes in a dream. So in a sense, I want to say that Sherlock Holmes is more real than a square circle, and that you are more real than Sherlock Holmes. And if we are characters in God's dream, then God may be more real than us.
Awesome, fun piece!
You linked your recent grim reaper video as evidence for why you’ve come to think that infinite sequences are problematic even if they are grounded (I take this to mean even if every member is necessary). Is it just the grim reaper argument that motivates this?