The Logic of Being: Historical Studies ed. by Simo Knuuttila, Jaakko Hintikka (review)

544 BOOK REVIEWS vide critical editions of the contributions by Richard Rufus and·-even more important-Richard Fishacre to the theology of Oxford and the continent Bayerishe Akademie der Wissenschaften Munich, West Germany RICH.ARD SCHENK, O.P. The Logic of Being: Historical Studies. Edited by SIMO KNUUTTIL.A and J.A.AKKO HINTIKK.A. Synthese Historical Library, 28. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985. Pp. xvi + 300 pp. $54.00 (cloth) . Unlike many examples of the genre, this collection of articles on the concept of being from Parmenides to Frege should and will be profitably consulted by philosophers of various stripes. Whether read piecemeal or straight through, these investigations carry on an open-ended dialogue in which historians of philosophy, philosophers of logic, and semanticists can participate equally. The editors are to be commended for presenting eleven articles (about an equal number of previously published and new studies) that are generally complementary to one another. What makes the collection so useful and interesting·, however much one disagrees with the thesis, is its concentrated focus on the difficulties of attributing to philosophers from Plato to Kant the Frege-Russell view that verbs for being are multiply ambiguous. It will perhaps be useful 'to begin with the concluding essay,· L. Haaparanta 's study " On Frege's Concept of Being," where the ambiguity thesis is discussed in greatest detail. She presents Frege's well-known articulation of the meanings of the verb ' to be ' as follows : (1) the is of identity (2) the is of predication (3) the is of existence, expressed by means either (i) of the existential quantifier and the symbol for identity or (ii) of the existential quantifier and the symbol for predication (4) the is of class-inclusion or generic implication Two points are worth noting. First, most of the contributors explore the ambiguity with reference to the is of identity, predication, and existence . Sceond, while ithe verb has several different meanings for Frege, most of the other philosophers discussed distinguish, at most, different uses. Many of the arguments against applying Frege's ambiguity thesis to earlier philosophers depend on this distinction between meaning and use; I will assess its cogency in specific contexts as they arise. BOOK REVIEWS 545 In Frege's analysis the crucial distinction is between the first-order copulative is and existence, a second-order concept. Since in Frege's view existence is a property of a first-order concept, it must lack all content. Haaparanta sums up the position well: "We presuppose the existence of objects; we do not say that they exist. For Frege, every predication carries with itself the claim of existence" (277). Influenced by Kant's argument that u existence is not predicate of a thing itself," Frege is willing to regard it as a proper concept, but not a first-order concept. This superordination of existence sounds reminiscent of Aristotle 's focus on predication and identity at the expense of existence (here it is better to speak of subordination, as the studies of Dancy and Hintikka on Aristotle indicate), but Frege's sharp distinction between concepts and objects is much closer to the Kantian position that we cannot know the essence of things in themselves. Thus, existence is a conceptual property though applicable to the instantiation of an object's properties; and identity statements, since they concern objects in themselves , are beyond the ken of reason. Certainly, Frege's thesis is " epistemologically motivated", as Haaparanta observes, but one is tempted to adopt a stronger conclusion: that the shift from an Aristotelian, or even Thomistic, ontology to Kantian epistemology contributes greatly to the emergence of the ambiguity thesis and renders it inapplicable to ancient and medieval metaphysics, even if, as Hintikka argues ("Kant on Existence and Predication"), Kant does not clearly distinguish different meanings of is·. The first four articles present a multi-faceted assault on the contemporary penchant for reading the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis into the Greek philosophers. C. H. Kahn's ''Retrospect on the Verb ' To Be' and the Concept of Being " is a useful precis of his indispensable work on the Greek verb for being. His particular concern is to further the "campaign against the uncritically ' existential ' interpretation...