Salas Sanchez-Bennasar is a visiting graduate student form the City University of New York, Graduate Center
Abstract: Quine's famous claim about existence is that to exist is to be the value of a bound variable. I argue that this is wrongheaded: it is neither necessary nor sufficient for existence. In bringing out the details of the Quinean position and my reasons against it, it will be clear that Quine's idea of existence is not what ontologists pretend to use. Secondly, I will talk about the NeoFregeans, who also have a criterion for existence, if slightly less known than the Quinean one. They claim that to exist is to be the referent of a singular term in a true context. I argue that this criterion does not work either, if we take the ontologist's task seriously. Interestingly, the flavor of the objections against the Quinean and those against this second position is the same. In a more constructive manner, the third part of the talk considers whether there is anything salvageable in these two attempts at capturing the concept of existence. A criterion containing the common denominator between Quine and the NeoFregeans is the positive proposal of this talk. I argue that the correct analysis will contain this latter criterion, which I call the semantic aspect of existence, even if there are also other central aspects to existence that are independent of it, that is, the semantic aspect is necessary but not sufficient for existence.
