| 14874 | Anaximander saw the contradiction in the world - that its own qualities destroy it [Anaximander, by Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Anaximander discovers the contradictory character of our world: it perishes from its own qualities. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 19 [239] | |
| A reaction: A lovely gloss on Anaximander, though I am not sure that I understand what Nietzsche means. |
| 481 | Nothing is created or destroyed; there is only mixing and separation [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: No thing comes into being or passes away, but it is mixed together or separated from existing things. Thus it would be correct if coming into being was called 'mixing', and passing away 'separation-off''. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B17), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 163.20 |
| 14028 | Nothing comes to be from what doesn't exist [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: Nothing comes into being from what is not. | |
| From: Epicurus (Letter to Herodotus [c.293 BCE], 38) | |
| A reaction: King Lear puts it better: Nothing will come of nothing [1.i]. There seems to be an underlying assumption that coming into being out of nothing is much weirder than just existing, but I am not convinced about that. It's all equally weird. |
| 14029 | If disappearing things went to nothingness, nothing could return, and it would all be gone by now [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: If that which disappears were destroyed into what is not, all things would have been destroyed, since that into which they were dissolved does not exist. | |
| From: Epicurus (Letter to Herodotus [c.293 BCE], 39) | |
| A reaction: This follows on from Idea 14028. Theologians will immediately spot that this is the underlying principle cited by Aquinas in his Third Way for proving God's existence (Idea 1431). |
| 23634 | Accepting the existence of anything presupposes the notion of existence [Reid] |
| Full Idea: The belief of the existence of anything seems to suppose a notion of existence - a notion too abstract, perhaps, to enter into the mind of an infant. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Intellectual Powers 2: Senses [1785], 05) | |
| A reaction: But even a small infant has to cope with the experience of waking up from a dream. I don't see how existence can be anything other than a primitive concept in any system of ontology. |
| 4475 | Saying a thing 'is' adds nothing to it - otherwise if my concept exists, it isn't the same as my concept [Kant] |
| Full Idea: We do not make the least addition to a thing when we declare the thing 'is'. Otherwise it would not be exactly the same thing that exists, but something more than we had thought in the concept, so we could not say the exact object of my concept exists. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B628/A600) | |
| A reaction: This still strikes me as a wonderful objection to the ontological argument for God. It raises the question of what 'is' does mean. Is it a 'quantifier'? What is the ontological status of a quantifier? |
| 11008 | Existence is not a first-order property, but the instantiation of a property [Frege, by Read] |
| Full Idea: When Kant said that existence was not a property, what he meant was, according to Frege, that existence is not a first-order property - it is not a property of individuals but a property of properties, that the property has an instance. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Stephen Read - Thinking About Logic Ch.5 |
| 8643 | Affirmation of existence is just denial of zero [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Affirmation of existence is nothing but denial of the number nought. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884], §53) | |
| A reaction: Mathematicians - don't you luv 'em. No doubt this is helpful in placing existence within the great network of logical inferences, but his 'nothing but' is laughable. I don't see much existential anguish in the denial of zero. |
| 14463 | Existence can only be asserted of something described, not of something named [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Existence can only be asserted of something described, not of something named. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy [1919], XVIII) | |
| A reaction: This is the motivation behind Russell's theory of definite descriptions, and epitomises the approach to ontology through language. Sounds wrong to me! |
| 13133 | The world is facts, not things. Facts determine the world, and the world divides into facts [Wittgenstein] |
| Full Idea: The world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. The totality of facts determines what is the case, and what is not the case. ..The world divides into facts. | |
| From: Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 1 - 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This is said to be a radical new ontology, because the facts are held to be prior to the things and their properties, which are presumably abstractions from the primitive facts. The modern heir of this is Armstrong's 'states of affairs'. |
| 16434 | Some say what exists must do so, and nothing else could possible exist [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers deny there could have been anything other than what in fact exists, or that anything that exists could have failed to exist. This is developed in very different ways by Wittgenstein (in 'Tractatus'), Lewis and Williamson. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Mere Possibilities [2012], 1) | |
| A reaction: This could come in various strengths. A weak version would say that, empirically, that all talk of what doesn't exist is vacuous. A strong necessity (Williamson?) that totally rules out other possible existence is a very odd view. |
| 16439 | A nominalist view says existence is having spatio-temporal location [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: A nominalist definition of existence is 'having spatio-temporal location'. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Mere Possibilities [2012], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: This would evidently be physicalist as well as nominalist. Presumably it fits the 'mosaic' of reality Lewis refers to. I find this view sympathetic. A process of abstraction is required to get the rest of the stuff we talk about. |
| 15532 | 'Allists' embrace the existence of all controversial entities; 'noneists' reject all but the obvious ones [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: An expansive friend of the controversial entities who says they all exist may be called an 'allist'; a tough desert-dweller who says that none of them exist may be called a 'noneist'. | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.152) | |
| A reaction: Lewis gives examples of the obvious and the controversial entities. Lewis implies that he himself is in between. The word 'desert' is a reference to Quine. |
| 6070 | Existence is a primary quality, non-existence a secondary quality [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Existence is like a primary quality; non-existence is like a secondary quality. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Logical Properties [2000], Ch.2 n29) | |
| A reaction: Since McGinn thinks existence really is a property, and hence, presumably, a predicate, I don't quite see why he uses the word "like". A nicely pithy and thought-provoking remark. |
| 12214 | 'Exists' is a predicate, not a quantifier; 'electrons exist' is like 'electrons spin' [Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: The most natural reading of 'electrons exist' is that there are electrons while, on our view, the proper reading should be modeled on 'electrons spin', meaning every electron spins. 'Exists' should be treated as a predicate rather than a quantifier. | |
| From: Kit Fine (The Question of Ontology [2009], p.167) | |
| A reaction: So existence IS a predicate (message to Kant). Dunno. Electrons have to exist in order to spin, but they don't have to exist in order to exist. But they don't have to exist to be 'dead'. |
| 10279 | Can we discover whether a deck is fifty-two cards, or a person is time-slices or molecules? [Shapiro] |
| Full Idea: Can we 'discover' whether a deck is really identical with its fifty-two cards, or whether a person is identical with her corresponding time-slices, molecules, or space-time points? This is like Benacerraf's problem about numbers. | |
| From: Stewart Shapiro (Philosophy of Mathematics [1997]) | |
| A reaction: Shapiro is defending the structuralist view, that each of these is a model of an agreed reality, so we cannot choose a right model if they all satisfy the necessary criteria. |
| 8321 | All possible worlds contain abstracta (e.g. numbers), which means they contain concrete objects [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: One could argue that some abstract objects exist in all possible worlds (e.g. natural numbers) and that abstract objects always depend for their existence upon concrete objects, and conclude that some concrete objects exist in all possible worlds. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (The Possibility of Metaphysics [1998], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: We're all in the dark on this one, but I quite like this argument. I can't conceive of a reality that lacks natural numbers, and the truths that accompany them, and I personally think that numbers arise from the patterns of physical reality. |
| 9427 | For Humeans the world is a world primarily of events [Mumford] |
| Full Idea: For Humeans the world is a world primarily of events. | |
| From: Stephen Mumford (Laws in Nature [2004], 03.6) |
| 19659 | The absolute is the impossibility of there being a necessary existent [Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: We maintain that it is absolutely necessary that every entity might not exist. ...The absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being. | |
| From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is the main thesis of his book. The usual candidates for necessary existence are God, and mathematical objects. I am inclined to agree with Meillassoux. |
| 18740 | If 'exist' doesn't express a property, we can hardly ask for its essence [Horsten/Pettigrew] |
| Full Idea: If there is indeed no property of existence that is expressed by the word 'exist', then it makes no sense to ask for its essence. | |
| From: Horsten,L/Pettigrew,R (Mathematical Methods in Philosophy [2014], 2) | |
| A reaction: As far as I can tell, this was exactly Aristotle's conclusion, so he skirted round the question of 'being qua being', and focused on the nature of objects instead. Grand continental talk of 'Being' doesn't sound very interesting. |
| 19034 | The world is either a whole made of its parts, or a container which contains its parts [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: We can think of the world as a 'whole' that has everything as its parts, like raisins in a cake, or we can think of the world as a 'container', which is disjoint from everything there is, like a bottle containing water. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 7.3) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Space and time seem to have a special role here, and it is hard to think of any other candidates for being the 'container'. I think I will apply my 'what's it made of' test to ontology, and opt for the world as a 'whole'. |