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Existentialism is the claim that quidditative properties and singular propositions are ontologically dependent upon the individuals they involve. In this essay, I consider two arguments for existentialism and find them both unconvincing. I then give an argument against the existential thesis that singular propositions are ontologically dependent on contingent objects. I conclude the essay by defending my argument against potential existentialist objections. In the process, I defend the claim that serious actualism – i.e., the view that no object could have had a property without existing – is true.

In this Class, Ibn Sina discusses existence and its causes. Ibn Sina argues that there is an uncaused being that causes the existence of all other things. He first asserts that existence in an absolute sense, the sense beyond the existence of this or that thing, is predicable of the caused and the uncaused existence, as well as the universals, quiddities, or primary realities of things that are intelligible and beyond the sensible. He then differentiates between quiddities and existence and between their causes, taking triangularity as an example of quiddities and considering its surface and lines as if they are its material cause (what makes a thing in potentiality) and formal cause (what makes a thing in actuality). He also elaborates the nature and function of the efficient and final causes, their relationship to other causes (whether or not embodying form and matter), and to each other.

Four examples plausibly overstep the limits of intelligibility: Newtonian absolute space and time, certain conceptions of possibilia, quiddities, and Cartesian egos. This chapter argues that the materials of the earlier part of the book allow us to explain what the overstepping consists in. For any genuine concept, there is an account of the relation in which a thinker must stand to an entity in order to be thinking of it in that way. In all these four problematic cases, for reasons of principle, there is no account of the relation to the subject matter that would be required to be thinking of the elements of the problematic ontology. This excess dimension diagnosis contrasts with epistemic and verificationist accounts. The diagnosis is compared with Dasgupta’s, which appeals to inexpressible ignorance. It is argued that both the excess dimension diagnosis and inexpressible ignorance trace back to the explanatory emptiness of the problematic ontologies.

Chapter 4 articulated and defended the identity theory of powers. This chapter criticizes competing theories of powers, categoricalist theories chief among them. These theories are committed to quidditism, the claim that properties have brute principles of identity and individuation, typically combined with an account of metaphysically contingent laws of nature. Both commitments encounter difficulties. Also, some categoricalists take dispositions to be higher-order properties whose definitions quantify over other properties. They argue that these higher-order properties make no causal contribution to things beyond the contributions made by their lower-order categorical bases. If they are right, then there is good reason to think that higher-order properties do not exist, for the Eleatic principle introduced in Chapter 2 implies that the only existing properties are ones that enable individuals to enter into causal relations. Any causal work that might be attributed to so-called higher-order properties is done instead by their lower-order causal bases.

Chapters 5 and 6 deal with ideas about outsourcing the object, rather than the subject, of understanding or cognition. They begin in Chapter 5 with the Augustinian Platonist thought that in order to “have certain knowledge of creatable quiddities, … our minds must make contact with those objects where they exist immutably: in Divine exemplars.” Thus they deal with debates about ways in which our having concepts of created things does or does not depend on our first having concepts of which God is the object. Chapter 5 focuses on the writings of three of the most influential 13th-century theologians: Bonaventure, Matthew of Aquasparta, and Henry of Ghent.

This chapter elaborates two standard versions of a view of consciousness known as Russellian Monism. The key idea of this view is that the fundamental entities in micro-reality have intrinsic natures not specified in microphysics, natures that include a range of properties crucial to consciousness and conscious states. The reductive version holds that the relevant properties are themselves genuinely conscious properties of various sorts. The primitivist version holds that the relevant properties ground macro-level conscious properties without themselves involving consciousness. It is shown that neither version is defensible and that neither helps with the paradox.

This chapter argues that every object is empty of self-nature. First, it argues that what it is to be a particular person — their quiddity — is to be a locus in a network of relations to other things. This is then generalized to all objects. Nothing is what it is in and of itself, but only in relation to other things. A precise characterization of this is then given using the techniques of graph theory. In particular, the quiddity of an object is determined by the locus at the root of a tree of relations, each branch of which is infinite. It is then argued that, not only do some objects depend on each other for their quiddity, but that in the last analysis, all objects so depend. This is the inter-connectedness of the Net of Indra.