Being and Essence in Contemporary Interpretations of Aristotle

Abstract

In the proceedings of the Conference on “Analytical Ontology”, held at University of Innsbruck in September 1997, Peter van Inwagen’ published an interesting paper, where, from a point of view which he defines “broadly Quinean”, he argued in favour of the following four theses: (1) Being is not an activity; (2) Being is the same as existence; (3) Being is univocal; (4) The single sense of being or existence is adequately captured by the existential quantifier of formal logic. The first thesis is clearly an anticipation of the third. It is supported by affirming that the differences of being, alleged by philosophers who conceive it as an activity (e.g. Sartre and the existential phenomenological tradition), are only differences in nature, which do not concern being, once admitted the distinction between a thing’s being and its nature. The second thesis is defended by referring to Quine, and states that there is no difference between what is expressed by ‘there is’ and ‘exists’. The third thesis is defended by means of the observation that existence is closely tied to number, because “to say that unicorns do not exist is to say something very much like saying that the number of unicorns is 0”, while “to say that horses exist is to say that the number of horses is 1 or more”. On the basis of this observation van Inwagen [1998] can conclude that “the univocacy of number and the intimate connection between number and existence should convince us that there is at least very good reason to think that existence is univocal”. The fourth thesis is the most developed, by means of arguments drawn from formal logic, about which I am not able to judge. But they — this is at least my impression — only explain and justify in a more sophisticated way the main argument brought in defence of the third thesis.