Existence

There is no universally accepted theory of what the word existence means. The dominant (though by no means universal) view in twentieth-century and contemporary Anglo-American philosophy is that existence is what is asserted by statements of first order logic of the form "for some x Fx". This agrees with the simple and commonsensical view that, in uttering "There is a bridge across the Thames at Hammersmith", or "A bridge crosses the Thames at Hammersmith", we are asserting the existence of a bridge across the Thames at Hammersmith. The word "existence", on this view, is simply a way of describing the logical form of ordinary subject-predicate sentence.

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Unfortunately, this simple view is vulnerable to a number of philosophical objections, and the so-called problem of existence is one that still exercises the minds of contemporary philosophers. This article is a brief overview of those problems, of the solutions that certain philosophers have offered, and suggestions for further reading.

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