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- W2487130618 abstract "However, this modern view is not incontrovertible, and for many centuries philosophers have thought differently about existence. In particular, traditional metaphysics, with its roots in the thought of Aristotle and his medieval followers, the Scholastics, holds that entities belonging to different ontological categories do not all exist in exactly the same way. For example, it holds that entities in the category of substance have a more basic kind of existence than entities in the category of quality or mode, because entities of the latter sort depend for their existence on substances, whereas the reverse is not the case (see Lowe 1998: ch. 6). Thus it would be said that the shape and color of an individual substance – of an individual animal, let us say, such as a horse – depend for their existence on that individual, precisely because they are essentially its qualities and so cannot exist separately from it. But it would also be said that even within the most fundamental category of substance, there are degrees of being, because there are degrees of existential dependence. Consider, for instance, something such as a pile or heap of rocks. This is clearly an individual thing or substance, rather than a quality or mode of any such thing. Even so, the pile evidently depends for its existence on the individual rocks that make it up – whereas they do not, conversely, depend for their existence on it. In that sense, the pile is a more dependent being than is any of the rocks that compose it. However, the rocks in turn depend for their existence on other things, most obviously the various mineral particles of which they themselves are composed. It would seem that all material substances are, very plausibly, dependent beings in this sense, even if some should turn out to be simple substances, not composed of anything further. For it seems that they are all contingent beings, where a contingent being is one that does not exist of necessity. Consider, for example, a single elementary particle of physics, such as a certain individual electron, e, which is, according to current physical theory, not composed of anything more fundamental. Surely, e might not have existed at all. But could e have been the only thing to exist? We might think that we can imagine a world in which all that exists is this single electron, e. But, in fact, modern physics would repudiate this idea as nonsensical. Electrons are not really to be thought of as being ‘particles’ in a commonsense way, but are, rather, best thought of as quantized states of a space-permeating eld; and according to this way of thinking of them, it really makes no sense to envisage one of them as having an existence that is wholly independent of anything else. However, even though it makes no sense to think of an electron, or indeed any ‘material substance,’ as having such a wholly independent existence, we clearly can make sense of the idea of a being that does have such an existence: a being that depends for its existence, in any sense whatever, on absolutely nothing other than itself. This, indeed, would seem to be the core of the idea of a maximally great being. Without presuming that such a being does exist, we can surely afrm that such a being could exist. And this, in effect, is what premise (2) of the argument is afrming. So let us turn to that premise. Premise (2) states that ‘A being than which none greater can be conceived exists at least in the mind.’ In other words, we can coherently think of there existing such a being, one which has an absolutely independent existence. A corollary seems to be,as I have just remarked, that such a being could exist: it has at least possible existence, even if it does not actually exist. The reference to ‘the mind’ in premise (2) suggests that something of a purely psychological nature is being afrmed by it, but this is misleading. The ontological argument is not supposed to be about our powers of thought or imagination, but about whether a being of a certain kind could and indeed does exist. Understood in this way, premise (2) seems to be fairly compelling. That being so, the cogency of the ontological argument in its present formulation turns on the status of premise (3), which afrms that ‘It is greater to exist in reality than to exist only in the mind.’ This premise, too, needs some unpacking. The idea behind it can be cashed out in the following way. I have already said that it seems plausible to suppose, in line with premise (2), that a maximally great being could exist. But suppose that such a being is a merely possible being, that is to say, a being that could exist, but does not actually exist, and therefore does not exist of necessity. To suppose this is to suppose that a maximally great being could be a contingent being. However, expressed this way, the supposition looks decidedly suspect. For we have already seen that it is very plausible to suppose that all contingent beings are, in one way or another, dependent beings, and hence not ‘maximally great,’ in the sense of having an absolutely independent existence. In other words, a supposedly maximally great being that did not exist of necessity and so also in actuality (‘in reality’) would not really be a maximally great being. This, in effect, is what premise (3) can be construed as saying. Of course, this is not the only possible way of construing (3): it could be construed instead as saying, merely, that anything that actually exists is, for that reason alone, a ‘greater’ being than anything that does not actually exist but merely could exist. Indeed, that is what (3) more literally seems to be saying. But understood in that way (3) is not at all plausible. Clearly, given that we are now interpreting the notion of degrees of being in terms of degrees of existential dependency, it is rather implausible to contend that no merely possible being is less dependent in nature than any actually existent being. Consider, for instance, some merely possible material substance, such as an individual horse that might have existed but does not in fact exist, and contrast this with an actually existing quality or mode of an actually existing horse. Surely, the actually existing quality is an entity that is more of a dependent being in its nature than is the merely possible horse: for the latter is (or would be) a substance whereas the former is merely a quality, and all qualities are subordinate to substances in their degree of dependency. Of course, if one thought of possible existence as being a lesser (because, presumably, more dependent) kind of existence than actual existence, then indeed one might suppose that even the most dependent actually existing entity is less dependent than the least dependent merely possible entity. But that way of thinking is very arguably confused. To say that something could exist (‘has possible existence’) is, plausibly, not to assign to it a kind of existence, but merely to qualify or modify, in a certain manner, a claim concerning the existence of that thing. For example, when I say that the golden mountain could exist, I am not assigning to it a shadowy sort of existence: indeed, I am not afrming that it does exist at all, in any sense whatever." @default.
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- W2487130618 date "2013-01-17" @default.
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- W2487130618 title "The Ontological Argument" @default.
- W2487130618 doi "https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203813010-47" @default.
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