substances, and we also must think that any necessarily existing substance is an
atemporal being.
On the other hand, if we wish to hold fast that material objects can be substances,
then we must claim that location cannot be understood existentially. Eitherlocation
is a primitive relation, or we should be a relationalist about space–time. Probably for
the Aristotelian the latter is the more attractive option.
There are surely other interesting ways in which one could formulate complicated
ontologies drawing from the preceding subsections.
2.7 Non-Logical Governing Principles
I have argued that systematically variably polyadic features and systematically vari-
ably axiomatic features are prima facie less than perfectly natural features. I then
presented ontological schemes according to whichexistenceis either a systematically
variably axiomatic feature or a systematically variably polyadic feature, thus estab-
lishing the prima facie case that existence is analogous. Although these arguments do
notconclusively showthat we must accommodate modes of being in our ontology,
they suffice to show that modes of being deserve to be taken seriously.
In section 2.5, I focused on principles governing existence, that is, principles
stateable using only purely logical vocabulary along with some sort of expression
whose semantic value is existence. The idea was that this would force us to focus as
much as possible on the status of existence itself rather than on putatively extraneous
concerns about the natures of existents. (If, however, it turns out that what we think
of as logic is itself not topic-neutral, it might be that a crisp contrast of this sort
cannot be drawn.) In the remainder of this chapter, I will look at principles that are
not principles of any logic, since they contain non-logical vocabulary by pretty much
everyone’s lights. But those principles also suggest that there are different modes
of being.
As a way of entry into this discussion, let’s reconsider two of the varieties of
possibilism discussed in section 2.5.4, specifically David Lewis’s version of possibi-
lism, and a view just like Lewis’s except that actuality is taken to be an absolute status
and a mode of being that only some of what there is enjoys. To many of us, the
second view is far more plausible. However, on the face of it, it also seems that we
should judge that it is the worse view: the second view has all of the same ontological
and ideological commitments as Lewis’s view but also makes an additional meta-
physical distinction that Lewis’s view does not make. Why would adding a commit-
ment improve a view rather than make it worse?
Part of the explanation that I favor is that there areepistemologicalprinciples
governing actuality that are obliterated if actuality is a merely indexical status. The
epistemology of the possible and the actual is fundamentally different: for example,
we can know a priori that there is a merely possible talking donkey, but we cannot
know a priori that there is an actual talking donkey. If something exists in exactly the