Versions Compared

Key

  • This line was added.
  • This line was removed.
  • Formatting was changed.

SCANNED PDF

"Existence" is yet another term having different senses that can be clarified by a threefold analysis. Actually, to take account of all the relevant senses in which it can be understood, two such analyses are required.

...

(3) in the narrow sense as the property of being concretely real in the way of an individual, as distinct from the ways of other concretely real things, i.e., events and/or aggregates.---N—N. B.: As understood here, an event, being real, is real for something else; and, being concretely real, is also such that other things can be real for it. But an event is not, and cannot be, real for itself in the way in which an individual can be and is. Thus whereas the identity of an event is strict because it has, or is essentially qualified by, all of its properties, the identity of an individual is genetic because it has, or is essentially qualified by, only some of its properties, having, or being qualified by, any others, not essentially, but only accidentally. In other words, an event becomes and perishes but does not change, whereas an individual changes whether or not it becomes and perishes. Both an event and an individual, however, are, in their different ways, singulars as distinct from aggregates, an aggregate being a group of events and/or individuals that has less unity than any of its several members.

...

Given this definition, the second threefold analysis builds on the first by further clarifiying clarifying three distinct senses in which "existence" in the narrow sense can, in turn, be understood, viz.:

...

(3) in the emphatic sense as the property of an individual in the ordinary sense whose essence is to be contingently actualized in some understanding event(s) and which therefore is a particular individual that exists not only contingently but also understandingly.--N—N. B.: The distinctions between a particular individual, the universal individual, and a particular understanding individual-like individual—like those clarified previously between an event, an individual, and an aggregate--are aggregate—are all distinctions of logical-ontological type.

...