The Concept of Existence: Definitions by Philosophers https://www.ontology.co/existence.htm Theory and History of Ontology by Raul Corazzon | e-mail: [email protected] The Concept of Existence: Definitions by Major Philosophers INTRODUCTION "I think an almost unbelievable amount of false philosophy has arisen through not realizing what 'existence' means." (p. 234) From: Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge. Essays 1901-1950. Edited by Robert Charles Marsh, New York: Macmillan 1956. "Philosophical discussion of the notion of existence, or being, has centered on two main problems which have not always been very clearly distinguished. First, there is the problem of what we are to say about the existence of fictitious objects, such as centaurs, dragons, and Pegasus; second, there is the problem of what we are t o say about the existence of abstract objects, such as qualities, relations, and numbers. Both problems have tempted philosophers to say that there are inferior sorts of existence a s well as the ordinary straightforward sort, and they therefore often suggest that we use the word "being" to cover both kinds but restrict "existence" to "being" of the common, non-fictitious, non-abstract sort. (Sometimes the term "reality" is proposed for "existence" or for "being.") T he problems of fiction and abstraction are different, how ever, for there are both real and fictitious abstractions. For example, the integer between two and four is real, but the integer between two and three is fictitious. On the other hand, there are both concrete and abstract fictions; for example, the winged horse of Bellerophon and the integer between two and three. Accordingly, philosophers have often dealt with the two problems in quite different ways and perhaps ought to do so. While these are the two main problems, there are others, f or example, that of what we are to say of the being of objects which have not yet begun, or have now ceased, to exist. The history of this subject, moreover, has been tangled with theological issues, to which it will be necessary to refer at certain points." (p. 493) From: Paul Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan 1967, entry Existence, by Arthur Norman Prior; Second edition edited by Donald M. Borchert, New York: Thomson Gale 2006, vol. 3, pp. 493-500. "The Indo-European languages in which all the philosophers from Parmenides to Sartre have written have a verb represented in English by 'be', which some of the time at least does the same work as is done by 'exist'. Everything that can be called philosophy of existence that was written by the Greek philosophers of antiquity was expressed with the help of 'einai', the Greek equivalent of 'be'; and it is impossible to reach any clear understanding of their doctrines without examining how they used this word, and how its synonyms in other languages are used." (Preface, p. VIII- IX) "German and French idioms, which most frequently use 'Es gibt' and 'Il y a' in place of 'There is', seem to show a stronger awareness than English of the difference between existential propositions and propositions ascribing properties to objects. Nevertheless even these languages have forms 'Es ist' and 'Il est', which make use of equivalents of the verb 'be', as English uses 'be' in 'There is' and 'There are', and one would have to look further a field to find languages where there was no possibility of construing an existential judgement as predicating being of an object or objects in 1 di 14 26/12/2018, 12:36 The Concept of Existence: Definitions by Philosophers https://www.ontology.co/existence.htm the same way as dwelling in Transylvania or coming down the road can be predicated of an object or objects. Latin, as we have seen, has the simple unadorned use of 'est' and 'sunt' as a possible substitution for the verbs 'existit' and 'existunt'. Classical Greek, which lacks any word obviously equivalent to 'exist', is forced to use parts of 'einai', its synonym for 'be', much more widely than the languages we have mentioned, for the expression of existential judgements. Thereby hangs a philosophical story of epic dimensions, a Great Chain of Philosophies of Being." (p. 3) From: Christopher John Fards Williams, What is Existence?, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981. "In the extended discussion of the concept (or concepts) of Being in Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle, the theme of existence does not figure as a distinct topic for philosophical reflection. My aim here is to defend and illustrate this claim, and at the same time to suggest some of the reasons why it is that the concept of existence does not get singled out as a topic in its own right. Finally, I shall raise in a tentative way the question whether or not the neglect of this topic was necessarily a philosophical disadvantage. Let me make clear that my thesis is limited to the classical period of Greek philosophy, down to Aristotle. The situation is more complicated in Hellenistic and Neoplatonic thought, (...) I suspect that a careful study of these Greek terms would reveal that even in their usage we find no real equivalent of our concept of existence. In any case, this later terminology (...) plays no part in the formulation of Plato's and Aristotle's ontology, and I shall ignore it here. My general view of the historical development is that existence in the modern sense becomes a central concept in philosophy only in the period when Greek ontology is radically revised in the light of a metaphysics of creation: that is to say, under the influence of Biblical religion. As far as I can see, this development did not take place with Augustine or with the Greek Church Fathers, who remained under the sway of classical ontology. The new metaphysics seems to have taken shape in Islamic philosophy, in the form of a radical distinction between necessary and contingent existence: between the existence of God, on the one hand, and that of the created world, on the other." (p. 7) (...) To return now to the question with which we began: Why does existence not emerge as a distinct concept in Greek philosophy? In principle the answer is clear. My explanation is that in Greek ontology in its early stages, in Plato and Parmenides, the veridical concept was primary, and the question of Being was the question of "reality" as determined by the concept of truth. Since this conception of reality is articulated in Plato by copula sentences of the form "X is Y," it turns out that even the concept of existence gets expressed in this predicative form: as we have seen, Platonic Greek for "X exists" is "X is something" . In the scheme of categories which Aristotle takes as the starting point for his own investigation of being, this same predicative pattern serves as the primary device for analyzing what there is, and for showing how the various kinds of being are related to one another. So it is naturally the theory of predication, and not the concept of existence, which becomes the central and explicit theme of Aristotle's metaphysics, as it was the implicit theme of Plato's discussion of Being in the Sophist. (p. 15). From: Charles H. Kahn, Why Existence does not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy, in: Parviz Morewedge (ed.), Philosophies of Existence. Ancient and Medieval, New York: Fordham University Press 1982, pp. 7-17. (Reprinted in C. H. Kahn. Essays on Being, New York: Oxford University Press 2009, pp. 62-74.) ORIGINS OF THE TERM "EXISTENCE" "The terminology for existence is much more complicated, and I can only give a rough sketch of the problem. We have first to consider how 2 di 14 26/12/2018, 12:36 The Concept of Existence: Definitions by Philosophers https://www.ontology.co/existence.htm ὑπάρχειν (hyparkein) comes to be used as a synonym for εἶναι (einai) in its "existential" use, and then to follow the history of existere as the Latin rendering of ὑπάρχειν in this sense. Either topic could supply a separate monograph. ὑπάρχειν originally means "to make a beginning", "to take the initiative", "to take the first step (in doing so-and-so)", e.g. to begin a guest- friendship (in the earliest occurrence of the verb, Odyssey 24.286) or to initiate hostilities (...) Thus before ὑπάρχειν becomes specialized as a verb of "existence" we find it used in a predicative construction as an expressive equivalent for εἶναι as copula verb. It is, however, not this copula use but the more frequent construction with the dative that accounts for the first technical use of the verb in philosophy: the use in which it expresses in logical terms the attributive relation which is normally expressed in grammatical form by the copula. Instead of "A is B" Aristotle prefers to say τὁ β τὸ ἀ ὑπάρχειν B belongs to A" (Prior Analytics 25a,5 and throughout). Hence τα ὑπάρχοντα attributes (of a subject) " e.g. at De Interpretatione 16b 10. (And see Bonitz, Index Aristotelicum 789a29-b2; compare the more non- technical use ibid. a12-28.) Since "what belongs to a thing" includes not only its accidents but also essential or substantial attributes in the first category, ὑπάρχειν is said in as many ways as εἶναι , i.e. in as many ways as there are categories or combinations of categories (Pr. An. 48b2-4, 49a6-9). (...) Apart from this technical use in logic and grammar, the most common meaning of ὑπάρχειν in later Greek seems to be that which we render as 'to exist' or "'to be real'.