Tim Crane/ Danielle Sands
Tuesday 8 October 2013, 6.30-8pm
Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
Tim Crane, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
Chair: Danielle Sands, Visiting Lecturer, Department of English, Queen Mary University of London and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow
‘The nature of existence’ is a phrase that will mean different things to different people. To some it will bring to mind the question of the nature of our own existence. This lecture was not about that important question, but about another one: the nature of existence as such. What is it for anything at all to exist? Tim Crane addressed this question by contrasting existence with non-existence, and contrasting the kinds of properties existing and non-existing things have. He rejected the claim, deriving from Descartes and Malebranche, that nothingness can have no properties, and instead he argued that non-existing things can only have properties of one distinctive kind. This marks a difference with existing things, and tells us something about the nature of existence.
