“Life” in Logical Space

Abstract

Many debates in philosophy and especially outside it, in the public arena, are about whether something or other exists. God is the best example for the debates in the public arena. Debates between theists and atheists who are not philosophers many times end up in overheated and bitter quarrels, because they seldom devote some thought to the very notion of existence. A good example for the debates in the philosophical arena is the issue of whether merely possible (nonactual) objects exist. Here, of course, the issue of existence itself does arise at every turn. In this chapter, I will try to offer a new way of looking at existence, which goes beyond the classical debate between Quineans and Meinongians. The former take the existential quantifier as signifying existence as such, whereas the latter typically distinguish between an existential quantifier that is ontologically committing and one that is more general and is ontologically non-committing. The view I propose in this chapter goes beyond this disagreement, in that it denies one common assumption, shared by Quineans and Meinongians, according to which existence is an absolute notion. Instead, I propound and argue for the idea that existence should be taken as relative, namely, relative to regions of Logical Space.