Frege and existence

[awatkins69]

I was talking to a philosopher friend of mine about Frege. Is existence a univocal term? Do you think that existence can be predicated in the same manner for everything? Doesn’t this conflict with Thomism?

 

[Hypatia]

To provide a short answer:

1. Yes, the idea that existence is univocal contradicts Thomas (see ST I.1-13) and later Thomism (which works out the analogia entis in a lot more specificity than one can find in Thomas himself).
2. The idea that existence is univocal becomes influential with Duns Scotus (ens commune) and following. So the idea predates Frege.
3. really short answer: No, beings do not seem to present themselves as univocal manifestations of Being. But that is the kind of discussion that is likely to take up a lot more words. You are touching on very fundamental philosophical commitments at that point.

 

[awatkins69]

To provide a short answer:

1. Yes, the idea that existence is univocal contradicts Thomas (see ST I.1-13) and later Thomism (which works out the analogia entis in a lot more specificity than one can find in Thomas himself).
2. The idea that existence is univocal becomes influential with Duns Scotus (ens commune) and following. So the idea predates Frege.
3. really short answer: No, beings do not seem to present themselves as univocal manifestations of Being. But that is the kind of discussion that is likely to take up a lot more words. You are touching on very fundamental philosophical commitments at that point.

Woah I didn’t know it was prefigured in Bl. Duns Scotus. Care to elaborate on point 3 anymore? I know it would be long, but I’m very interested. Also, do you know what any of the medieval Muslim philosophers thought on this point?

 

[Hypatia]

Woah I didn’t know it was prefigured in Bl. Duns Scotus. Care to elaborate on point 3 anymore? I know it would be long, but I’m very interested. Also, do you know what any of the medieval Muslim philosophers thought on this point?

I may get myself in a bit of trouble, or at least I would if there were people into Islamic philosophy on the site… Of the great thinkers of the classical age, Ghazali comes closest to holding a position akin to the univocity of existence. One has to be careful, since in Ghazali, God’s existence is qualitatively different from our, so the univocity is not full and complete, as it is in Scotus (for whom we mean the same thing when we say “God exists” and “I exist”). But the radical atomism in his account of creation itself implies (and I would be careful about saying more than that) that created things simply and indifferently are. But for the most part, most of the thinkers of the Classial Age, from Farabi to Ibn’Sina, from Arabi to Suhrawardi, all think that creation participates the One to varying degrees.

As to point 3, I will just say that if you think that Being refers to something more than a projection or abstraction generated by the human mind, or that it has more than a linguistic function — that Being is that by which there are beings (however that might be understood) — then you are going to see beings as more or less complete manifestations of Being. The more the individual actualizes the Real, the more real it is. A being that, somehow, merely is…is a very degraded being: isolated and alienated from the completion for which it yearns (which can be seen in the fact that it remains, even in alienation, related to the whole). One can think of the distinction found in parts of the medieval latin tradition between “sunt” and “bene sunt”: being and right or well being.

This ought not be an abstract claim about the degree to which one finds Being in beings, but, in a certain way, the extent to which one finds oneself in all things and all things within oneself: i.e., the extent to which one is at harmony with, or alienated from and in conflict with, the beings by which Being gives itself.

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I would point out that while the univocity of existence is common enough in some circles of modern philosophy, the idea that being is something that is accomplished (i.e. the classic relation between being and act; recall that God in the Aristotelean and Christian Scholastic tradition is “Actus Purus”… and even “ex-istence” is the dynamism of the act of being) remains present within a great deal of Continental, existential and even some Marxian thought (again, not surprising given the debt Marx owes to Aristotle).

 

[awatkins69]

Great summary! Thanks.