What It Is to Exist: The Contribution of Thomas Aquinas’s View to the Contemporary Debate

The second part reconstructs Thomas Aquinas’s view on existence (esse) and argues that it contributes a new perspective which allows us to see why the contemporary debate has reached this impasse. It has come to this point because it has taken a premise for granted which Aquinas’s view rejects, namely, that the existence of an object consists in something’s having a property. A decisive contribution of Aquinas’s theory of esse is that it makes use of the ideas of metaphysical participation and composition. In this way, it can be explained how an object can have esse without being the case that esse is a property of it.

This book brings together a reconstruction from the history of philosophy with a systematic study on existence and is therefore relevant for scholars interested in contemporary or medieval theories of existence.