Results for 'Existence and Nonexistence'

977 found
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  1. Serious Actualism and Nonexistence.Christopher James Masterman - 2024 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy (3):658-674.
    Serious actualism is the view that it is metaphysically impossible for an entity to have a property, or stand in a relation, and not exist. Fine (1985) and Pollock (1985) influentially argue that this view is false. In short, there are properties like the property of nonexistence, and it is metaphysically possible that some entity both exemplifies such a property and does not exist. I argue that such arguments are indeed successful against the standard formulation of serious actualism. However, (...)
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  2. Idealism, Intentionality, and Nonexistent Objects.Gordon Knight - 2001 - Journal of Philosophical Research 26:43-52.
    Idealist philosophers have traditionally tried to defend their views by appealing to the claim that nonmental reality is inconceivable. A standard response to this inconceivability claim is to try to show that it is only plausible if one blurs the fundamental distinction between consciousness and its object. I try to rehabilitate the idealistic argument by presenting an alternative formulation of the idealist’s basic inconceivability claim. Rather than suggesting that all objects are inconceivable apart from consciousness, I suggest that it is (...)
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  3. Nonexistence and Aboutness: The Bandersnatches of Dubuque.Stephen Yablo - 2020 - Critica 52 (154):77-100.
    Holmes exists is false. How can this be, when there is no one for the sentence to misdescribe? Part of the answer is that a sentence’s topic depends on context. The king of France is bald, normally unevaluable, is false qua description of the bald people. Likewise Holmes exists is false qua description of the things that exist; it misdescribes those things as having Holmes among them. This does not explain, though, how Holmes does not exist differs in cognitive content (...)
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  4. Existence Without Existence: A Unified Theory of Being.Caleb M. - manuscript
    In this theory, we explore the interconnectedness of existence and non-existence through subjectivity and objectivity. We provide numerous logical proofs and explanations for existence and nonexistence and the historical context surrounding them, noting that philosophers have been unable to choose between subjectivity and objectivity for centuries. We contend that traditional logic could be revamped to accommodate the inner connectedness of paradoxes like existence without existence, primarily subjectivity and objectivity, which are incorporated in all. (e.g., (...)
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  5. Representations of imaginary, nonexistent, or nonfigurative objects.Winfried Nöth - 2006 - Cognitio 7 (2):277-291.
    According to the logical positivists, signs (words and pictures) of imaginary beings have no referent (Goodman). The semiotic theory behind this assumption is dualistic and Cartesian: signs vs. nonsigns as well as the mental vs. the material world are in fundamental opposition. Peirce’s semiotics is based on the premise of the sign as a mediator between such opposites: signs do not refer to referents, they represent objects to a mind, but the object of a sign can be existent or nonexistent, (...)
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  6. An Analytic Theologian's Stance on the Existence of God.Benedikt Paul Göcke - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (2):129--146.
    The existence of God is once again the focus of vivid philosophical discussion. From the point of view of analytic theology, however, people often talk past each other when they debate about the putative existence or nonexistence of God. In the worst case, for instance, atheists deny the existence of a God, which no theists ever claimed to exist. In order to avoid confusions like this we need to be clear about the function of the term (...)
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  7. (1 other version)The Worseness of Nonexistence.Theron Pummer - 2019 - In Solberg Gamlund and, Saving lives from the badness of death. Oxford University Press. pp. 215-228.
    Most believe that it is worse for a person to die than to continue to exist with a good life. At the same time, many believe that it is not worse for a merely possible person never to exist than to exist with a good life. I argue that if the underlying properties that make us the sort of thing we essentially are can come in small degrees, then to maintain this commonly-held pair of beliefs we will have to embrace (...)
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  8. The once and always possible.Kory Matteoli - 2024 - Synthese 203 (28):1-32.
    In Death and Nonexistence, Palle Yourgrau defends what he calls the principle of Prior Possibility: nothing comes to exist unless it was previously possible that it exists. While this seems like a plausible principle, it’s not strong enough; it allows the impossible to come to exist. I argue for a stronger principle: nothing exists unless its existence has always been possible. Further, I argue that we then have reason to accept a surprising result: nothing exists unless its (...) is always possible. Or, more generally, that nothing is the case unless it’s always possible that it’s the case. (shrink)
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  9.  56
    Argumentative Philosophical Analysis of Bertrand Russell's Text on the Question of the Existence of God and the First Cause based on the thought of Thomas Aquinas.Jesus Fernandez-Pedrera Correa - forthcoming - Zenodo.
    In his work Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Bertrand Russell attempts to demonstrate the nonexistence of God. In this work we will address the analysis of the consistency of his arguments on the existence of God and the First Cause, using the AV (Acceptability-Inferential Validity) scheme in a philosophical-argumentative study of them, to reveal their weaknesses, and we will propose a more solid type of argumentation and its corresponding counterargument.
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  10. Are There Non-Existent Entities?Theodore J. Everett - 2005 - In Larry Lee Blackman, The philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov: a collegial evaluation. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press. pp. 3-19.
    There are things of which it is true to say that there are no such things. How can we resolve this paradox? Panayot Butchvarov argues that there are objects of reference that are not also entities, where the former must merely be thinkable but the latter must be indefinitely re-identifiable. This paper argues that fictional and many other unreal objects are indeed indefinitely re-identifiable, so they must be counted as existing things on Butchvarov's theory. The paradox is best resolved by (...)
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  11. Spinoza on Fictitious Ideas and Possible Entities.Oberto Marrama - 2016 - The European Legacy 21 (4):359-372.
    The aim of this article is twofold: to provide a valid account of Spinoza’s theory of fictitious ideas, and to demonstrate its coherency with the overall modal metaphysics underpinning his philosophical system. According to Leibniz, the existence of romances and novels would be sufficient to demonstrate, against Spinoza’s necessitarianism, that possible entities exist and are intelligible, and that many other worlds different from ours could have existed in its place. I argue that Spinoza does not actually need to resort (...)
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  12. Relevance without existence.Maria Buyko, Vincenzo Moscati & Salvatore Pistoia-Reda - 2024 - Glossa 9 (1):1-13.
    The present paper presents experimental evidence confirming that contextually mismatching scalar implicatures can be generated even when quantifiers range over empty domains. In the literature, this possibility has been interpreted as providing further evidence for a grammatical approach to scalar implicatures. The main result presented here is that scalar sentences with empty domains are judged as more infelicitous when associated with a mismatching implicature than variants with the same empty domains but associated with a non-mismatching implicature. We interpret this result (...)
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  13. Gods and Dictatorships: a Defence of Heroical Apatheism.Ian von Hegner - 2016 - Science, Religion and Culture 3 (1):17.
    Democracy is usually contrasted with the concept of dictatorship, and is defined as a type of government in which power flows from the citizens to the leaders of government, who are selected through free elections. This article argues, that if the concept of democracy is generalized to be universally applicable, then the concept of hypothetical gods’ right to rule results in dictatorship. Whereas the concepts of dictator and tyrant originally had a more positive meaning, those meanings have changed. However, the (...)
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  14.  54
    The Nature of Reali̇ty and God.Uğur Pervane - manuscript
    The existence of God is a controversial topic. Believers in God often claim there is evidence supporting God's existence and defend these arguments. Those who argue against the existence of God provide reasons and evidence for why God's nonexistence should be accepted. However, neither side has been able to convince the other. In this article, definitive proofs of God's nonexistence and the true nature of reality will be presented. When it comes to definitive proofs, examples (...)
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  15. Gibt es Gegenstände, die nicht existieren?Maria Reicher & Maria Elisabeth Reicher - 2000 - Metaphysica 1 (2):135–162.
    Those who are – in the tradition of Meinong – willing to accept the claim that there are objects that do not exist usually argue that the ontological commitment to nonexistent objects allows to resolve a variety of problems of reference and intentionality, such as: the problem of singular negative existential statements, the problem of discourse on past and future objects, the problem of discourse on fictitious objects, the problem of counterfactual existentials, the problem of allegedly necessary truths on nonexistent (...)
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  16. Dharmakīrti and Husserl on Negative Judgments.Zhihua Yao - 2007 - In Chan-Fai Cheung & Chung-Chi Yu, Phenomenology 2005, Vol. I, Selected Essays from Asia,. Zeta Books. pp. 731-746.
    Among various opinions in the controversy over the the cognition of non-existent objects (asad-ālambana-vijñāna) among various Buddhist and Indian philosophical schools or in the debate on the objectless presentations (gegenstandslose Vorstellungen) happened in the early development of phenomenology and analytic philosophy, I find that Dharmakīrti and Husserl hold similar views. Both of them have less interest in redefining the ontological status of nonexistent objects than Russell and Meinong. Rather they engage themselves in analyzing the experiential structure of negative cognition and (...)
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  17. Does a Truly Ultimate God Need to Exist?Johann Platzer - 2019 - Sophia 58 (3):359-380.
    We explore a ‘Neo-Cartesian’ account of divine ultimacy that raises the concept of God to its ultimate level of abstraction so that we can do away with even the question of his existence. Our starting point is God’s relation to the logical and metaphysical order of reality and the views of Descartes and Leibniz on this topic. While Descartes held the seemingly bizarre view that the eternal truths are freely created by God, Leibniz stands for the mainstream view that (...)
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  18. Impossible Objects and Other Anomalies.Philip Atkins - 2025 - In Maria J. García-Encinas & Fernando Martínez-Manrique, Special Objects: Social, Fictional, Modal, and Non-Existent. Springer. pp. 199-223.
    This is an exploration of some problems of nonexistence, with special attention paid to Nathan Salmón’s account of merely possible and impossible objects (or entities or things). According to this account, we can refer to such objects and attribute properties to them. The terms ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ should be understood in the familiar metaphysical sense, so that a merely possible object is one that does not exist at the actual world but exists at some metaphysically possible world (it could (...)
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  19. Dwa typy abstrakcjonizmu w ontologii fikcji.Maciej Sendłak - forthcoming - Przegląd Filozoficzno-Literacki.
    "The main aim of the paper is to compare two types of abstractionistic accounts of fictional objects, and to analyze their consequences for interpretation of existential quantification. According to a proponent of general abstractionistic theory, fictional objects have abstract nature in a way similar to contracts, marriages, and the likes. This view is an alternative to strongly realistic accounts of fictional objects, defended by Terence Parsons or David Lewis. Within abstractionistic theories, as in all philosophical areas, one can find divergences (...)
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  20. Ethics and Human Behavioral Modernity.Alan Griswold - manuscript
    Humans were once purely animal, the same as all the other animal species, implying that the practice of ethics must have been nonexistent until quite recently in human history. It has been during the species’ turn towards behavioral modernity that ethical precepts and systems have been formed, eventually becoming an integral part of modern human existence. This essay will explore the cause for this transition, emphasizing the idea that there are now two different sources of modern human behavior. On (...)
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  21. Reality and Unreality.Nathan Salmon - manuscript
    A collection of ten previously published essays on existence, nonexistence, empty names, fiction and myth, and free logic.
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  22. The Temporal Bias Approach to the Symmetry Problem and Historical Closeness.Huiyuhl Yi - 2022 - Philosophia 51 (3):1763-1781.
    In addressing the Lucretian symmetry problem, the temporal bias approach claims that death is bad because it deprives us of something about which it is rational to care (e.g., future pleasures), whereas prenatal nonexistence is not bad because it only deprives us of something about which it is rational to remain indifferent (e.g., past pleasures). In a recent contribution to the debate on this approach, Miguel and Santos argue that a late beginning can deprive us of a future pleasure. (...)
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  23. (1 other version)Parfit and Non-Identity Problem.Hossein Khodadadi - 2024 - Journal of the Belarusian State University. Philosophy and Psychology 8 (1):41-46.
    One of the longstanding issues that haunted the minds of many philosophers is our responsibility toward future generations. However, our crude intuition tells us that we owe many tasks toward next generations and our offspring, this seemingly obvious common-sense view has been disputed seriously and now is a matter of controversy one of the philosophical arguments that most forcefully challenged the intuitively accepted responsibility toward nonexistent people has been developed by Dereck Parfit [8]. According to this argument, the presently existent (...)
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  24. Modal Meinongianism and Characterization.Francesco Berto & Graham Priest - 2014 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 90 (1):183-200.
    In this paper we reply to arguments of Kroon (“Characterization and Existence in Modal Meinongianism”. Grazer Philosophische Studien 86, 23–34) to the effect that Modal Meinongianism cannot do justice to Meinongian claims such as that the golden mountain is golden, and that it does not exist.
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  25. How Can Buddhists Prove That Non-Existent Things Do Not Exist?Koji Tanaka - 2021 - In Sara Bernstein & Tyron Goldschmidt, Non-Being: New Essays on the Metaphysics of Nonexistence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 82-96.
    How can Buddhists prove that non-existent things do not exist? With great difficulty. For the Buddhist, this is not a laughing matter as they are largely global error theorists and, thus, many things are non-existent. The difficulty gets compounded as the Buddhist and their opponent, the non-Buddhist of various kinds, both agree that one cannot prove a thesis whose subject is non-existent. In this paper, I will first present a difficulty that Buddhist philosophers have faced in proving that what they (...)
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  26. ‘Pure’ Time Preferences Are Irrelevant to the Debate over Time Bias: A Plea for Zero Time Discounting as the Normative Standard.Preston Greene - 2021 - Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (3):254-265.
    I find much to like in Craig Callender's [2022] arguments for the rational permissibility of non-exponential time discounting when these arguments are viewed in a conditional form: viz., if one thinks that time discounting is rationally permissible, as the social scientist does, then one should think that non-exponential time discounting is too. However, time neutralists believe that time discounting is rationally impermissible, and thus they take zero time discounting to be the normative standard. The time neutralist rejects time discounting because (...)
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  27. Eternal Damnation: A Reply to Karori Mbugua’s “Gentler Theology of Hell”.Reginald M. J. Oduor - 2015 - Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya 7 (2):123-140.
    This article is a reply to Karori Mbugua’s article titled “The Problem of Hell Revisited: Towards a Gentler Theology of Hell” (Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya, New Series, Vol.3 No.2, December 2011, pp.93-103). The present article does not in any way seek to argue for or against the existence of eternal damnation. Instead, it advances the view that while Mbugua raises important philosophical issues around the question of eternal damnation, those questions deserve a (...)
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  28. (1 other version)Divine Hiddenness and Inculpable Ignorance.Robert P. Lovering - 2004 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 56 (2/3):89-107.
    J. L. Schellenberg claims that the weakness of evidence for God’s existence is not merely a sign that God is hidden, “it is a revelation that God does not exist.” In Divine Hiddenness : New Essays, Michael J. Murray provides a “soul-making” defense of God’s hiddenness, arguing that if God were not hidden, then some of us would lose what many theists deem a good thing: the ability to develop morally significant characters. In this paper, I argue that Murray’s (...)
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  29. Meinongian Merits and Maladies.Samuel Hoadley-Brill - manuscript
    According to what has long been the dominant school of thought in analytic meta-ontology––defended not only by W. V. O. Quine, but also by Bertrand Russell, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and many others––the meaning of ‘there is’ is identical to the meaning of ‘there exists.’ The most (in)famous aberration from this view is advanced by Alexius Meinong, whose ontological picture has endured extensive criticism (and borderline abuse) from several subscribers to the majority view. Meinong denies the identity of being (...)
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  30. Does Division Multiply Desert?Theron Pummer - 2014 - Philosophical Review 123 (1):43-77.
    It seems plausible that (i) how much punishment a person deserves cannot be affected by the mere existence or nonexistence of another person. We might have also thought that (ii) how much punishment is deserved cannot increase merely in virtue of personal division. I argue that (i) and (ii) are inconsistent with the popular belief that, other things being equal, when people culpably do very wrong or bad acts, they ought to be punished for this—even if they have (...)
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  31. Platonism, Nominalism, and Semantic Appearances.Justin Clarke-Doane - forthcoming - Logique Et Analyse.
    It is widely assumed that platonism with respect to a discourse of metaphysical interest, such as fictional or mathematical discourse, affords a better account of the semantic appearances than nominalism, other things being equal. Of course, other things may not be equal. For example, platonism is supposed to come at the cost of a plausible epistemology and ontology. But the hedged claim is often treated as a background assumption. It is motivated by the intuitively stronger one that the platonist can (...)
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  32. Rationally Not Caring About Torture: A Reply to Johansson.Taylor W. Cyr - 2014 - The Journal of Ethics 18 (4):331-339.
    Death can be bad for an individual who has died, according to the “deprivation approach,” by depriving that individual of goods. One worry for this account of death’s badness is the Lucretian symmetry argument: since we do not regret having been born later than we could have been born, and since posthumous nonexistence is the mirror image of prenatal nonexistence, we should not regret dying earlier than we could have died. Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer have developed (...)
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  33. NEUROTEOLOGÍA ¿ES HOY LA NUEVA TEOLOGÍA NATURAL? / Is Neurotheology Now the New Natural Theology?Miguel Acosta - 2015 - Naturaleza y Libertad. Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares 5:11-51.
    La Neuroteología surge como una nueva forma de explicar las relaciones entre el ser humano y Dios, las religiones y la espiritualidad en general a partir de la neurología (estudio del sistema nervioso, especialmente del encéfalo). Pero en algunos casos pretende incluso demostrar la existencia o no existencia de Dios. En este trabajo deseo exponer de qué manera algunas formas de Neuroteología manifiestan un rasgo sintomático de la cultura actual donde la ciencia actúa como un saber omnímodo que aspira explicar (...)
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  34. Selling Yourself Short? Self-Ownership and Commodification.Robert S. Taylor - 2023 - Public Affairs Quarterly 37 (2):138-152.
    One powerful argument against self-ownership is that it degrades personhood by leading individuals to view themselves and others as mere instrumental goods, alienable commodities to be exchanged in markets like other products and services. In general terms, this line of criticism (called the “commodification argument”) maintains that a direct and causal relationship exists between certain legal institutions (self-ownership) and certain attitudes (instrumentalism) and that the undesirability of the latter justifies restrictions on the former. In this article, I will critically examine (...)
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  35. A Deflationary Metaphysics of Morality.Fritz J. McDonald - 2010 - Acta Analytica 25 (3):285-298.
    The metaphysical dispute between moral realists and antirealists is cast in terms of properties: the realist holds that moral properties exist, the antirealist denies this claim. There is a longstanding philosophical dispute over the nature of properties, and the obscurity of properties may make the realist/antirealist dispute even more obscure. In the spirit of deflationary theories of truth, we can turn to a deflationary theory of properties in order to clarify this issue. One might reasonably worry that such an account (...)
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  36. Fictitious Existence versus Nonexistence.Nathan Salmón - 2024 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 100 (4):574-585.
    A correct observation to the effect that a does not exist, where ‘a’ is a singular term, could be true on any of a variety of grounds. Typically, a true, singular negative existential is true on the unproblematic ground that the subject term ‘a’ designates something that does not presently exist. More interesting philosophically is a singular, negative existential statement in which the subject term ‘a’ designates nothing at all. Both of these contrast sharply with a singular, negative existential in (...)
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  37.  20
    Poverty as a Product of Systemic Failure, Violation of Balance, and Ignorance.Angelito Malicse - manuscript
    Poverty as a Product of Systemic Failure, Violation of Balance, and Ignorance -/- By: Angelito Enriquez Malicse -/- Introduction -/- Poverty is not merely an economic condition; it is a deeply rooted social issue that stems from systemic failure, violation of balance, and ignorance. While poverty is often viewed as an individual problem, it is, in reality, a consequence of flawed institutions, unsustainable practices, and a lack of proper education. When societies fail to establish equitable systems, disrupt the natural balance (...)
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  38. Heroical Apatheism: Mala Fide Bootstrapping Obligations.Ian Von Hegner - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy, Culture and Religion 39 (2018):76-92.
    Discussions on hypothetical gods virtually always focus on the latter’s existence or nonexistence. However, this is only the secondary question. Heroical apatheism distinguishes these questions from the primary question, which pertains to the importance of these gods. It is a deeply ingrained assumption that if the gods have created the universe and humankind, then this implicitly entails the obligations that these gods must be worshipped and obeyed. These relations between existence and acts and worship and obedience to (...)
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  39. Committing Ourselves to Nothing: An anti-orthodox view of existential quantifier expressions.Stephen M. Nelson - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Minnesota
    There is a significant difference between the words `is' and `exists' that has either been overlooked or under-appreciated by many philosophers. This difference comes in sentences that express existential quantification using `is', `exists', or their cognates, such as, "There are cookies in the jar," or, "There exists a strange species of fish that nobody has studied yet." Phrases such as `there are' and `there exists' are existential quantifier expressions, since they're used to express existential quantification. The orthodox view of these (...)
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  40. Existence and Quantification Reconsidered.Tim Crane - 2011 - In Tuomas E. Tahko, Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 44-65.
    The currently standard philosophical conception of existence makes a connection between three things: certain ways of talking about existence and being in natural language; certain natural language idioms of quantification; and the formal representation of these in logical languages. Thus a claim like ‘Prime numbers exist’ is treated as equivalent to ‘There is at least one prime number’ and this is in turn equivalent to ‘Some thing is a prime number’. The verb ‘exist’, the verb phrase ‘there is’ (...)
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  41. Contingent Existence and Iterated Modality.Cian Dorr - 2017 - Analysis 77 (1):155-165.
    A discussion of a view, defended by Robert Adams and Boris Kment, according to which contingent existence requires rejecting many standard principles of propositional modal logic involving iterated modal operators.
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  42.  64
    Existence and coexistence of and by means of speech, and its consequences.Zuzana Svobodová - 2020 - Paideia: Philosophical e-Journal of Charles University 16 (4):1-9.
    Existence and coexistence of and by means of speech, and its consequences. – The text is concerned with several questions that are interrelated with what was termed “logos” by the ancient Greeks. The questions are as follows: If, according to Aristotle, man is the only spiritual being in the world to be endowed with speech, what does this mean for the (self)education of man? If, according to Augustine, understanding another person’s speech is decisive for whether we want to be (...)
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  43. Contingent Existence and the Reduction of Modality to Essence.Trevor Teitel - 2019 - Mind 128 (509):39-68.
    This paper first argues that we can bring out a tension between the following three popular doctrines: (i) the canonical reduction of metaphysical modality to essence, due to Fine, (ii) contingentism, which says that possibly something could have failed to be something, and (iii) the doctrine that metaphysical modality obeys the modal logic S5. After presenting two such arguments (one from the theorems of S4 and another from the theorems of B), I turn to exploring various conclusions we might draw (...)
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  44. Existence and Modality in Kant: Lessons from Barcan.Andrew Stephenson - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (1):1-41.
    This essay considers Kant’s theory of modality in light of a debate in contemporary modal metaphysics and modal logic concerning the Barcan formulas. The comparison provides a new and fruitful perspective on Kant’s complex and sometimes confusing claims about possibility and necessity. Two central Kantian principles provide the starting point for the comparison: that the possible must be grounded in the actual and that existence is not a real predicate. Both are shown to be intimately connected to the Barcan (...)
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  45. An Intrapersonal Addition Paradox.Jacob M. Nebel - 2018 - Ethics 129 (2):309-343.
    I present a new argument for the repugnant conclusion. The core of the argument is a risky, intrapersonal analogue of the mere addition paradox. The argument is important for three reasons. First, some solutions to Parfit’s original puzzle do not obviously generalize to the intrapersonal puzzle in a plausible way. Second, it raises independently important questions about how to make decisions under uncertainty for the sake of people whose existence might depend on what we do. And, third, it suggests (...)
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  46. The Existence (and Non-existence) of Abstract Objects.Richard Heck - 2011 - In Richard G. Heck, Frege's Theorem. New York: Clarendon Press.
    This paper is concerned with neo-Fregean accounts of reference to abstract objects. It develops an objection to the most familiar such accounts, due to Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, based upon what I call the 'proliferation problem': Hale and Wright's account makes reference to abstract objects seem too easy, as is shown by the fact that any equivalence relation seems as good as any other. The paper then develops a response to this objection, and offers an account of what it (...)
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  47. Existence and Free Logic.Dolf Rami - manuscript
    In this paper I aim to defend a first‐order non‐discriminating property view concerning existence. The version of this view that I prefer is based on negative (or a specific neutral) free logic that treats the existence predicate as first‐order logical predicate. I will provide reasons why such a view is more plausible than a second‐order discriminating property view concerning existence and I will also discuss four challenges for the proposed view and provide solutions to them.
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  48. Ontology, ‘Existence’ and The Role of Intuition.Kristie Miller - 2007 - In Christian Kanzian, Persistence. Ontos. pp. 103-118.
    Metaphysicians frequently appeal to intuition. But when is that appeal useful? I consider that question by focusing on our existential intuitions. In particular, I want to go some way to answering the question of whether, and when, appeal to existential intuitions is useful, by consid-ering the issue in the light of an argument for unrestricted composition. This argument appeals to a difference in the extent to which restricted and unrestricted compositionalists appeal to existential intuitions, and concludes that at the very (...)
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  49. Individuals, Existence, and Existential Commitment in Visual Reasoning.Jens Lemanski - 2024 - Open Philosophy 7 (1):1-25.
    This article examines the evolution of the concept of existence in modern visual representation and reasoning, highlighting important milestones. In the late eighteenth century, during the so-called golden age of visual reasoning, nominalism reigned supreme and there was limited scope for existential import or individuals in logic diagrams. By the late nineteenth century, a form of realism had taken hold, whose existential commitments continue to dominate many areas in logic and visual reasoning to this day. Physical, metaphysical, epistemological, and (...)
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  50. To exist and to count: A note on the minimalist view.Francesco Berto & Massimiliano Carrara - 2009 - Dialectica 63 (3):343-356.
    Sometimes mereologists have problems with counting. We often don't want to count the parts of maximally connected objects as full-fledged objects themselves, and we don't want to count discontinuous objects as parts of further, full-fledged objects. But whatever one takes "full-fledged object" to mean, the axioms and theorems of classical, extensional mereology commit us to the existence both of parts and of wholes – all on a par, included in the domain of quantification – and this makes mereology look (...)
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