ABSTRACT
Being or existence is what one says of or ascribes to a thing when one says that that thing is identical with itself—that it is itself. If the proposed definition of ‘being’/‘existence’ is correct, its correctness suggests that the fact that one word has both senses is no mere linguistic accident. One objection to the identification of being with self-identity is that it represents being as a trivial feature of things and therefore represents being as a “thin” or trivial concept. If human beings cannot themselves understand the paraphrases, this fact will no doubt have a salutary effect on human intellectual self-satisfaction, but it will cast no doubt on nominalism. An adequate defense would involve trying to give some intuitive sense to the concepts of “strong being” and “weak being.”.
