Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Philosopher Brian Leftow has argued that the question cannot have a causal explanation (as any cause must itself have a cause) or a contingent explanation (as the factors giving the contingency must pre-exist), and that if there is an answer, it must be something that exists necessarily (i.e., something that just exists, rather than is caused ...
Arguments for and against an independent flow of time have been raised since antiquity, represented by fatalism, reductionism, and Platonism: Classical fatalism argues that every proposition about the future exists, and it is either true or false, hence there is a set of every true proposition about the future, which means these propositions describe the future exactly as it is, and this ...
In English, existential clauses usually use the dummy subject construction (also known as expletive) with there (infinitive: there be), as in "There are boys in the yard", but there is sometimes omitted when the sentence begins with another adverbial (usually designating a place), as in "In my room (there) is a large box."
The common view is that an entity either exists or not with nothing in between, but some philosophers say that there are degrees of existence, meaning that some entities exist to a higher degree than others. The orthodox position in ontology is that existence is a second-order property or a property of properties. For example, to say that lions ...
Solipsism (/ ˈ s ɒ l ɪ p s ɪ z əm / ⓘ SOLL-ip-siz-əm; from Latin solus 'alone' and ipse 'self') [1] is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
In predicate logic, an existential quantification is a type of quantifier, a logical constant which is interpreted as "there exists", "there is at least one", or "for some". It is usually denoted by the logical operator symbol ∃, which, when used together with a predicate variable, is called an existential quantifier (" ∃ x " or " ∃( x ...
He argued that "nothing" cannot exist by the following line of reasoning: To speak of a thing, one has to speak of a thing that exists. If one can speak of a thing in the past, this thing must still exist (in some sense) now, and from this he concluded that there is no such thing as change.
They often quote Einstein to support their thesis: "Events do not happen. They already exist and are seen on the Time Machine". [4] This form also allows for a multiplicity of gods, as there is no contradiction in achieving omniscience by multiple entities. There exist slight variations on the above categorization.