ABSTRACT
To matters of substance, whatever “exists” and the quantifiers mean, there would seem to be three possibilities: everything exists, nothing exists, and some things exist and some things don’t. In the twentieth century, Parmenides’ view made a comeback; indeed, it became the orthodox view. Of course, exponents of the modern Parmenideanism, do not subscribe to the sad view that Father Christmas really exists. The second driver for Parmenides’ comeback concerns identity. In a famous passage of “On What there Is,” Quine charges that non-existent objects have no well-defined identity conditions; but any entity must have such conditions, so the notion of a non-existent object is incoherent. The only thing one cannot do for non-existent objects, as one might attempt for existent ones, is provide identity conditions in terms of spatiotemporal locations: they have none. Thus, one cannot say that they are identical if they have the same spatial locations at all time.
