Being Qua Being: A Theory of Identity, Existence, and Predication by Panayot Butchvarov (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 159 Being Qua Being: A Theory of Identity, Existence, and Predication. By PANAYOT BuTCHVARov. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Pp. 274, with index. The author conceives this work as an essay in proto-metaphysics, that discipline which inquires what it means to be a world or to be in a world. He argues that the concepts of existence, identity, essential predication, and accidental predication are fundamental notions which we employ in understanding any world as such. These are, as it were, the transcendental characteristics of any world qua world, applying to any entity in a world as such. He begins his treatment of proto-metaphysical problems with the historically familiar puzzle of the apparent distinctness of identicals--for example, the identity in distinctness of the Morning Star and the Evening Star. He holds that one of two possible approaches to solving this problem is inevitable: either the appearance of distinctness is a mere appearance and must be explained without misrepresenting what is asserted in the identity claim; or there is somehow a real distinction which must be explained without denying true identity statements. The author opts for the latter alternative. And his theories of existence and predication follow upon this option. He distinguishes between formal identities, those of the form A=A, and material identities, those of the form A=B, urging that the latter are paradigmatic and the former degenerate expressions. In order to sustain his option and the division of identities into formal and material he adopts an ontology of entities and objects. According to the author, a thing is an entity, a reale, in terms of the limits of its identifiability. All real things can be indefinitely identified by means of true material identity claims. (The converse, that all indefinitely identifiable things are real, is more difficult to establish inasmuch as fictitious entities also seem indefinitely identifiable.) By contrast an object, which is logically prior to an entity, is anything that may be referred to, singled out for attention, classified, or subsumed under a concept. Thus while many objects are also entities, many are not. Although the author refrains from a Meinongian adoption of impossibilia, many merely intentional objects are permitted ontological status of a sort. The explanation of the puzzle about the Morning Star's being identical with the Evening Star despite the apparent difference is found by interpreting material identity statements as being about one entity and at the same time about two objects both of which are that entity. Thus the apparent distinctness in a true material identity claim is founded in a real distinctness in the objects which serve as its terms, while the identity truly affirmed is founded on the fact that the two really distinct objects 160 BOOK REVIEWS are but a single entity; in the case of the Morning and Evening Stars, the two objects are the one planet Venus. The distinction made by the author between object and entity, however, is one which the reviewer questions. Two theses of the author give rise to this query. (1) "The apparent distinctness of material identicals is simply their real distinction as objects " (p. 44) . (2) " The distinction between objects and entities is not a real distinction, a distinction between classes of things, but a distinction of reason, a distinction due solely to the application of concepts " (p. 45). Now, if both (1) and (2) obtain, we would be saying that, while object A differs only in reason from entity B and entity B differs only in reason from object C in a true material identity statement of the form A=C, the difference between A and C themselves is not rational but real. Whence arises this real distinction? If A and C differ from B only in reason, how do they differ from each other except in reason? And if A and C are identical with B in fact, how are they not identical with each other in fact? The difficulty would appear to be that a real difference, a difference of the type usually invoked in the case of real entities, is what is claimed oii behalf of objects which are logically prior to real entities and which...