Abstract

I am under no illusion that the statement of common issues will forestall controversy. On the contrary, one of the venerable devices of the experienced controversialist is to state all possible positions in his own terms. The three questions concealed behind the three terms in the title of this paper do not have a privileged or architectonic universality. They will not reconcile the oppositions of philosophic positions concerning the possibility, order, and relative importance of questions, and it is easy to anticipate reassortments they will undergo, if they are thought worthy of the effort, in the types of philosophy for which they find a place. My starting-point is "what is," rather than "being" or "existence," and I depart radically, therefore, from some of the dominant fashions of metaphysical discussion as well as from the fashions of non-metaphysical discussion of metaphysical issues. As a mark of that departure, I shall not base what I have to say on exposure of errors in Descartes or on refinements of insights in Hume or Kant, and I shall not express myself in neologisms constructed to retain, in English, distinctions or paradoxes derived from Descartes, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche, or profundities grasped from the exegesis of the analogies of poets or from the etymologies of words used by Greek philosophers. If I were to choose a dictum for aphoristic elaboration or paradoxical propulsion, I should interpret a statement from Avicenna: "That which the understanding conceives first and best, and into which it resolves all other conceptions, is 'that which is,' 'thing,' and 'necessary'." I should make this choice, not because I prefer or even understand Avicenna's position concerning that which is, but because I want to raise three questions which are suggested when Avicenna's statement is introduced in the context of problems of existence.