Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.791

   For example, one might think that the diachronic character of physical laws shows that physical objects have an innate ability to persist. If they did not, what would make the laws reliable predictors of objects’ behavior? Kvanvig and McCann find this thought lacking on the grounds that physical laws presuppose the continuing existence of the world. They are reliable because the presupposition is correct, but not because the objects they characterize are self -sustaining. Is the idea of an innate self-sustaining quality tenable? Kvanvig and McCann consider a number of possible construals and a…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/creation-and-conservation.md

2. 02 · blog0.786

   Existence (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Menu Browse Table of Contents What's New Random Entry Chronological Archives About Editorial Information About the SEP Editorial Board How to Cite the SEP Special Characters Advanced Tools Contact Support SEP Support the SEP PDFs for SEP Friends Make a Donation SEPIA for Libraries Entry Navigation Entry Contents Bibliography Academic Tools Friends PDF Preview Author and Citation Info Back to Top Existence First published Wed Oct 10, 2012; substantive revision Tue May 5, 2020 Existence raises deep and important …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/existence.md

3. 03 · blog0.785

   The previous objection is related to another difficulty raised by Caterus. In order to illustrate that the inference from the mental to the extra-mental commits a logical error, critics have observed that if such inferences were legitimate then we could proliferate ontological arguments for supremely perfect islands, existing lions, and all sorts of things which either do not exist or whose existence is contingent and thus should not follow a priori from their concept. The trick is simply to build existence into the concept. So, while existence does not follow from the concept of lion as such,…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descartes-ontological-argument.md

4. 04 · blog0.785

   It exists by its own power: [2] when we attend to immense power of this being, we shall be unable to think of its existence as possible without also recognizing that it can exist by its own power; and we shall infer from this that this being does really exist and has existed from eternity, since it is quite evident by the natural light that what can exist by its own power always exists. So we shall come to understand that necessary existence is contained in the idea of a supremely perfect being …. ( ibid .) Some readers have thought that Descartes offers yet a third version of the ontological …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descartes-ontological-argument.md

5. 05 · blog0.783

   When the polysemy of the copula (or of the verb ‘to exist’) is taken into account, it has proven very difficult to find a clear example of such a statement or proposition. What many philosophers take to be a profound dispute in the metaphysics of time may well turn out to be a mere verbal tangle. (Putnam (2008), by the way, has recently joined these critics: “[T]he question whether the past and future are ‘real’ is a pseudo-question.”) According to one author (Sider, 2006), there seems to be disagreement concerning the following assertion: dinosaurs exist. Presentists are understood to deny th…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/being-and-becoming-in-modern-physics.md

6. 06 · gutenberg0.782

   Proof.--Also evident from Def. iii. For each must exist in itself, and be conceived through itself; in other words, the conception of one does not imply the conception of the other.

   gutenberg/PG-3800-ethics/PG-3800.txt

7. 07 · blog0.782

   However, despite these clarifications, it must be conceded that the locution “ x exists only because y exists” is hardly very perspicuous, either as to its logical form or as to its exact meaning. Moreover, precisely because we have introduced the conjunction “because” as an explanatory conjunction, it may be felt that it is not well-suited to the ontological role now being devised for it (for one of the many recent attempts to specify the explanatory role of “because”, see deRosset 2013). There are perhaps two sources of worry here: first, that this approach invites a confusion between metaph…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/ontological-dependence.md

8. 08 · blog0.779

   Necessity (by virtue of another or in itself) defines the ways in which an existent exists: if an existent is necessary by virtue of another and therefore in itself possible, it establishes a relation ‘of being caused’ with something other than itself (its cause): it is precisely this relation that explains its existence. If an existent is necessary in itself, there is no causal relation at all (no cause). In this respect, possibility and necessity in existence are to be identified with the notion of need, dependence or link (the former) and with its negation (the latter; Ilāhiyyāt I, 6). Cons…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/ibn-sina-s-metaphysics.md

9. 09 · blog0.778

   There is a debate in the literature on properties between the abundant conception of properties, according to which there is a property corresponding to every natural language predicate and, more generally, every class of individuals, and the sparse conception of properties, according to which a predicate expresses a property only if the objects that predicate is true of resemble one another in an intrinsic way. If the abundant conception is true, then our first question may seem trivial: Existence is a property of individuals because sentences like ‘Bill Gates exists’ are grammatical and ther…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/existence.md

10. 10 · blog0.778

    Let us consider all possible things as an “aggregate” ( jumlah) . This raises two assumptions: (1) the aggregate is self-caused, or (2) the aggregate is caused by an external cause (Avicenna, al-Najāt : 2: 89). Avicenna excludes the former assumption, explaining that the nature of what is possible in itself cannot change without a cause. Hence, an aggregate of possible things remains possible in itself; it must be caused by another cause to become necessary. Given that the series of causes and effects cannot progress ad infinitum , we must conclude that the existence of an aggregate of possibl…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/isaac-albalag.md