. Being seems at first to be a property of everything, or at least of everything there is, for how can anything have a property unless it is there to have it? Do unicorns have, say, the property of being vegetarian? Or is it only that they would have it if there were any unicorns? But if we accept this latter view, being cannot be a property after all, for anything which was to have it would have to have it already in order to do so, which is absurd; to say that something exists is not to say something about it. This point, that being is not a property, or, as it is commonly expressed, that ‘exists’ is not a (logical as against grammatical) predicate, was insisted on by Kant who used it to attack the ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, though others have disagreed (see Strawson). It raised the question: what counts as being a property or (logical) predicate?
A position to some extent like Kant’s is that of Aristotle, who insisted that being could not be an all-embracing genus (as animal is the genus of horse, cow, etc.), and that to call something existent is not to add to its description. (He said the same about unity and, for a different reason, about goodness.) Out of this arose the medieval doctrine of transcendentals. Aquinas listed ‘being’, ‘one’, ‘true’, ‘thing’, ‘something’, ‘good’ as transcending the CATEGORIES and applying to everything. Some other writers, e.g. Duns Scotus, use ‘transcendentals’ rather more widely, and Aristotle said of ‘good’ not, with Aquinas, that everything real was somehow good, but that ‘good’ was predicable in all the categories—a substance, quality, relation, etc. could be good. These transcendentals are usually included among the syncategorematic terms (see CATEGORIES (end)). They were intended to delineate the characteristics of being qua being, another notion originating in Aristotle, who made it the subject matter of metaphysics. In English, ‘being’ can be a participle (‘Being fat, I ate less’) or a gerund (‘Being fat is unhealthy’), but Greek distinguishes, and Aristotle uses the participle, sometimes in the plural (‘beings qua beings’). Interpretations of it differ. It may refer to everything that is, considered just as being, or to something which somehow accounts for the being of everything else. This may be substance in general or the highest kind of substance like God, or the movers of the cosmic spheres. On this latter view God and the movers account for the being of other substances, and substance accounts for that of qualities, relations, etc.
Despite the difficulties in supposing that there are things which do not exist, philosophers have often been reluctant to put into one basket all the things that in some sense have being. Aristotle shows this reluctance in his doctrine of CATEGORIES (see Metaphysics, Book 4, chapter 2), but more recently, different kinds of being have been distinguished in another way. Existence is sometimes distinguished from subsistence and other notions. Meinong, for instance, evidently thinking that a thing must in some sense be there for us to talk about it at all, thought that material objects in space and time exist, along with other things in space and time like shadows and gravitational fields, while things like UNIVERSALS, numbers and the difference between red and green, subsist. Fictional or imaginary objects, which can be concrete (unicorns) or abstract (the prime number between eight and ten), are sometimes said to subsist, but for Meinong they neither exist nor subsist; he says simply that they ‘are objects’ and have Sosein which means, literally, being so, or essence. But ‘exist’ and ‘subsist’, like ‘existent’ and ‘subsistent’, are often used interchangeably, especially when it is said that certain things, such as universals, do have being in some sense, and are not, as nominalism holds, analysable in terms of mere words.
Existence and subsistence, etc. can here be regarded as different grades or kinds of being. One strand of idealism treats being rather as having different degrees. Reality as a whole, the ‘absolute’, exists fully, while its parts derive their reality from their relations to it and to each other, and exist, but less fully, in proportion to their comprehensiveness.
Carnap divided questions of existence into those internal and external to a given system, e.g. that of arithmetic. ‘Is there a prime number between six and nine?’ is an internal question and belongs to arithmetic. ‘Do numbers exist?’ is an external question and belongs to philosophy, along with similar questions about universals, propositions, etc.
These various problems about fictional and timeless objects connect metaphysics with philosophical logic, and two further questions arise here. First, how do we tell to what ontology (i.e. list of things that are) a philosopher has committed himself? What counts as holding that, e.g. universals do or do not exist? Quine introduced this question to replace the traditional question, ‘What is there?’ He answered with the slogan, ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’; i.e. we are committed to the reality of a thing or kind of things if and only if we cannot state our views in formal (i.e. logical) language without using affirmative statements where VARIABLES ranging over the thing or things in question are bound by the existential quantifier (see QUANTIFICATION). The second question is what the laws of logic themselves commit us to. In particular can we prove by logic alone that there must be at least one object? By the predicate CALCULUS (let F stand for some predicate and a for any arbitrary individual) the seemingly undeniable logical truth ‘Everything is F or not F implies ‘a is F or not F.’ This in turn implies ‘At least one thing is F or not F’, and therefore that there is at least one thing. Various attempts to avoid this have been made. Both these questions are bound up with the interpretation of ‘is’ in the existential quantifier. Does it signify existence in a substantial sense, and if not, then what does it signify?
Many philosophers, especially the medievals and the existentialists, have contrasted a thing’s essence, or what it is, with its existence (though in the case of God, these have been thought by Aquinas to coincide—but the sense of ‘existence’ (‘esse’) here is controversial). Some forms of existentialism contrast being or essence with existence. Being belongs to animals and inanimate things, and existence only to humans, who can create themselves and are not products of the environment.
A linguistic question concerns the different senses often ascribed to the verb ‘to be’. The main senses are: existential (‘These things shall be’, ‘There is…’), predicative or copulative (‘This is red’), classifying (‘This is a shoe’; often subsumed under predicative), identifying (‘This is Socrates’, ‘Tully is Cicero’). In ancient Greek it seems to have had also a veridical sense (‘…is true’). Other senses, some rather technical, have been suggested, including constitutive (‘This house is bricks and mortar’) and presentational (‘The meaning of “bald” is: hairless’). Sometimes ‘is’ signifies the present tense as in ‘He is hot’, but sometimes it is timeless as in ‘Twice two is four’ or ‘Chaucer is earlier than Shakespeare’. What makes these senses different is that different things can be inferred from statements made by sentences containing them. ‘Tully is Cicero’ implies ‘Cicero is Tully’, but ‘This book is red’ does not imply ‘Red is this book’, where ‘red’ is the subject. But these differences are complex and controversial in detail, and so is the question what, if anything, links the senses together. (Aristotle thought at least some senses were linked by ‘focal meaning’; see above, and AMBIGUITY.) Some think the attempt to distinguish definite senses is mistaken (Kahn). See also SUBSTANCE, REFERRING, ESSENCE, CATEGORIES.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 998b22–7 (being not a genus; cf. Topics, 144a32-b4); 1003b26 (‘one’ and ‘existent’ not descriptive; cf. 1045a36-b8); book 4, chapters 1–3, book 6, chapter 1 (being qua being). Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a19–29 (‘good’).
J.Barnes, The Ontological Argument, Macmillan, 1972, chapter 3. (Also has bibliography, to which add S.Read, ‘“Exists” is a predicate’, Mind, 1980 (watch for misprints), discussed by L. Chipman, ‘Existence, reference and definite singular terms’, Mind, 1982.)
R.Carnap, Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edn, Chicago UP, 1956, supplement, A, § 2, reprinted in C.Landesman (ed.), The Problem of Universals, Basic Books, 1971. (External and internal questions.)
L.J.Cohen, The Diversity of Meaning, Methuen, 1962, § 33. (Does logic prove the universe cannot be empty?)
P.T.Geach, ‘Form and existence’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1954–5, reprinted in A.Kenny (ed.), Aquinas, Doubleday, 1969, Macmillan, 1970. (Essence and existence in Aquinas.)
C.H.Kahn, ‘The Greek verb “to be” and the concept of being’. Foundations of Language, 1966. (Attacks rigidity of distinction into senses.) See also his The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek, part 6 of J.W.M.Verhaar (ed.), The Verb ‘Be’ and its Synonyms, Reidel, 1973.
I.Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, revised 1787, B626–9. (Classic attack on existence as predicate.)
L.Linsky, Referring, RKP, 1967. (Discusses theories of Meinong and later writers, playing down the metaphysical extravagance often attributed to Meinong.)
E.J.Lowe, Kinds of Being: A Study of Individuation, Identity and the Logic of Sortal Terms, Blackwell, 1988. (Distinguishes uses of ‘is’, and claims mutual dependence of individuals and kinds.)
A.Meinong, ‘The theory of objects’, transl. in R.Chisholm (ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, Free Press, Glencoe, 1960.
Plato. Relevant passages include Republic, 476e ff., Timaeus, 27d.
W.V.O.Quine, ‘On what there is’, in Review of Metaphysics, 1948, reprinted in his book From a Logical Point of View, Harper and Row, 1953, in L.Linsky (ed.), Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, Oxford UP, 1952, in Landesman (above), and (with comments and contributions from others on the same theme) in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 1951. (‘To be is to be the value of a variable’. Cf. also his defence of this in ‘Ontology and ideology revisited’, Journal of Philosophy, 1983.)
W.Sellars, ‘Grammar and existence: a preface to ontology’, Mind, 1960, reprinted in Landesman (above). (Rather more technical criticism of Quine.)
P.F.Strawson, ‘Is existence never a predicate?’, Critica, 1967, reprinted in his Freedom and Resentment, Methuen, 1974.
J.J.Valberg, ‘Improper singular terms’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970–1, p. 132. (Presentational being.)
G.J.Warnock, ‘Metaphysics in logic’, in A.Flew (ed.), Essays in Conceptual Analysis, Macmillan, 1956. (Criticizes Quine’s use of logic to solve ontological problems.)
D.Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, Blackwell, 1980. (Constitutive ‘is’; see index.)
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