Christopher Shields - The Univocity of Existence

Recorded as part of the Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Colloquium on June 28th
The Univocity of Existence - Professor Christopher Shields (San Diego)
Let Ontological Monism be the view that being is univocal: although there are many kinds of beings-humans and electrons and facial expressions-some fleeting and some stable, some mind- and language-independent and some partly or fully constituted by human intentions, and also many kinds of kinds-compositional, functional, and socially constructed to name a few-being itself, qua being, does not admit of kinds, or, if you prefer, being does not admit of distinct ways of being. There is only being-and that is the being captured by the ‘There is’ at the head of this very sentence. Ontological Monism divides into two types: primitive and definitional. Primitive Ontological Materialism holds that being is simple and indefinable; Definitional Ontological Materialism holds that being, like, for instance, water, admits of a single, non-disjunctive essence-specifying definition, as water is defined as H2O. Contrasted with Ontological Monism are Ontological Pluralism, the view that there is more than one kind of being, or, perhaps, more than one way of being, and Ontological Scalarity, the view that being admits of degrees. Given these terms, we may state our thesis: Ontological Pluralism and Ontological Scalarity are false, or at least unmotivated, while Ontological Monism is true, or at least intelligibly motivated. Further, as independent of that thesis, one should appreciate that though the opponents of Ontological Monism sometimes embrace both Pluralism and Scalarity, these views are actually inconsistent with one another. The first chore, though, is to get clear about the thesis of Ontological Pluralism; doing so proves a non-trivial matter.
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