H. P. Grice on 'esse'

ESSE -- being Metaphysics, logic A participle from the verb “to be.” Its Greek equivalence is on, so ontology means a theory of being. Being can be ascribed to everything that can be talked about. Whatever we say using language must involve the verb “to be” in some form, and in this sense, as Hegel says, it is the widest but also the emptiest of all notions. Merely to say that something is amounts to saying nothing about it. But when Parmenides took being as a kind of subject-matter, his speculation about the nature of being was an attempt to locate the object of knowledge and to explain that it is the simple and unchanging ultimate reality behind the changing sensible world. Starting from Parmenides, metaphysics takes “what being is” as its central question. Different metaphysical systems can be viewed as different answers to this question. Plato claimed that only the universal forms are beings, while sensible things are both being and not being. His distinction initiates the lasting dichotomies between reality and phenomenon and between universal and particular. He eventually identified being in the truest sense with the Good. Aristotle thought that being is not a genus divisible into species, but rather that it has many senses. In his Categories, he discusses ten senses of being and argues that substance is the primary sense, while other categories such as quality, quantity, and relation are secondary senses. Thus, in seeking to determine “what is being” Aristotle focused his investigation on substance. Primary being is primary substance, which in turn is primary essence. Aristotle’s ontology is the source of the dichotomy between substance and attributes and between essential and accidental properties. In some of his discussion, he ascribed primary substance, that is, primary being, to God. The medieval metaphysicians distinguished between existence (that it is) and essence (what it is) on the basis that everything is created by God. God alone is the unity of existence and essence, while all other existing things have their essence necessarily grounded in God. Descartes claimed, “I think, therefore I am,” and Berkeley’s slogan was “To be is to be perceived.” These theses essentially determine the development of modern philosophy. The discussions of substance and essence in modern philosophy are all discussions about being. Contemporary existentialism is also mainly concerned with the relation between existence and essence in the search for authentic meaning in the contingency of human life. Heidegger claimed that we are still not clear about the word “being,” and launches a new investigation into the meaning of Being in his Being and Time. However, many other philosophers, such as Hume, Kant, Frege, Moore, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists believe that it is a mistake to ask questions about what is being. Traditional metaphysics fails to notice that the verb “to be” has a number of different uses, as copula, as sign of identity, as a sign of existence. Being or existence, that is, the existential sense of “to be,” is argued by contemporary philosophical logicians not to be a first-order predicate that ascribes a property to an object, but rather to be a second-order predicate that ascribes a property to a concept. The tendency to reject the pursuit of necessary existential grounds for contingent things does not imply that the question “what being is” disappears. Quine believes that in asking about being we are asking what it is for an entity of any given kind to exist. His answer is that “to be is to be the value of a variable.” What exists is anything that can be substituted for a variable of an acceptable quantified formula if that formula could form part of a scientifically acceptable theory about the world. A major focus of current discussion of being in analytic philosophy concerns what we should say about the existence of abstract entities such as possibilities, numbers, and classes and what we should say about the existence of fictitious entities, such as characters in a novel. Another version of the question “what being is” asks what is the distinguishing mark of an existing thing and leads on to questions of the distinguishing features of identity. “And indeed the question which was raised of old and is raised now and always, and is always the subject of doubt, viz what being is, is just the question, what is substance?” Aristotle, Metaphysics being (Aquinas) Metaphysics, medieval philosophy [Latin esse or ens] Following Aristotle, Aquinas believed that the word “being” is used in many ways and distinguished the actually existent in its own right (ens per se), the actually existent coincidentally (ens per accidens), potential and actual existents, and existence in the sense of the true (esse ut verum). In addition to restating Aristotle’s doctrines of being, Aquinas distinctively held that the existent in its own right is the predicate that is genuinely predicated of an individual, and is therefore a first-order predicate. In contrast, existence in the sense of true is ascribed to the predicate that indicates the nature of a kind and can therefore be applied to any subject of that kind, but does not belong to an individual. Thus existence in the sense of true is a second-order predicate that does not carry existential import. This idea was taken by Frege for his diagnosis of existence according to which existence is not a predicate. Aquinas clearly stated the distinction between existence (the fact that it is) and essence (what a being is), a contrast that originated in Avicenna’s distinction between necessary and possible being. All finite things owe their existence to the creation of God and do not exist necessarily in virtue of their essence. Only in God is there a unity of existence and essence. “We use the verb ‘is’ to signify both the act of existing, and the mental uniting of predicate to subject which constitutes a proposition.” Aquinas, Summa Theologiae