There is a peculiar game philosophers sometimes I play with their students. They ask them to make a complete list of everything in the room. The diligent ones will start cataloguing: chairs, desks, windows, that half-empty coffee cup someone forgot yesterday. The clever ones will add air, light, perhaps even the space between objects. And, then comes the troubling question: what about the absence of things that could be here but are not? What about the possibilities the room affords? The memories it contains? And here is where things get truly puzzling-should the list include the very existence of these things, or is existence something else entirely, something that makes the listing possible but can never itself be listed?¹ opens a This seemingly innocent exercise philosophical abyss that has swallowed some of the finest minds in human history. We find ourselves unable to catalogue what exists without first understanding what we mean by existence itself. Yet we seem unable to define existence without pointing to existing things. It is like being asked to explain what measurement is without being allowed to use any actual measurements as examples. The circular nature of this puzzle might seem like a defect in our thinking. It appears to be the greatest confusion that needs to be cleared up with better definitions or more precise language. However, what if this circularity is not an issue but a crucial feature of ontology? What if it is informing us something profound about the nature of existence itself?2 We live in a world where these questions have acquired a new urgency. When artificial intelligence researchers debate whether large language models are conscious, when tech companies promise us lives in the metaverse, when physicists tell us that particles exist in superposition until observed, we are wrestling with the same fundamental question that Parmenides posed two and a half millennia ago: What does it mean for something to be? The difference is that now, these are not just abstract puzzles for philosophy seminars. The answers we give shape how we build technology, how we understand ourselves, and how we register our social reality. Consider the current debate about whether AI systems like GPT-4 are conscious or whether they merely simulate consciousness. Before we can even begin to answer this question, we need to know what it would mean for consciousness to exist. Is consciousness something that exists in the same way a table exists? Or does it exist more like the way a democracy exists? Or perhaps like the way the number seven exists? Until we understand what we mean by existence itself, we are fumbling in the dark. We use words we do not fully understand to make distinctions we cannot properly justify. This book emerges from a simple but radical thesis: we have been approaching the question of existence backwards. Instead of first trying to understand what existence means and then determining what exists, philosophy has traditionally tried to catalogue what exists and then derive the meaning of existence from that catalogue. It is as if we tried to understand what health means by listing healthy people, or what beauty means by cataloguing beautiful objects. The approach seems natural, even scientific, but it contains a fatal flaw-it presupposes the very concept it is trying to explain. The thesis I want to defend can be stated directly: The general ontological question "What is there?" cannot be coherently answered without first addressing the more fundamental question "What is existence?" This prioritization reveals that existence is not a property that objects possess, like being red or being heavy, but rather something more fundamental-what Markus Gabriel calls their appearance within "fields of sense."6 Furthermore, and this is where things get particularly interesting.
Dr. Prashant Kumar is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Science and Thought, Universität Bonn, Germany, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Technology, Athens, Greece. He serves as Assistant Professor at Lakshmibai College, University of Delhi, India. His research spans ontology, metaontology, logic, and artificial intelligence, focusing on developing novel conceptual frameworks for understanding Al through contemporary ontological inquiry. Dr. Kumar holds a doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
The imagination of science fiction and the technological advancements that have followed it have introduced entirely new kinds of entities whose ontological status remains uncertain from a traditional standpoint. God, ghosts, unicorns, angels, and many other objects have long been subjected to such inquiry, yet recent developments compel us to reexamine the notion of existence afresh. In this book, Prashant Kumar takes up the challenge of addressing the question of existence without diluting it into adjacent questions- the how of existence, the why of existence, and so on. Before placing the question of existence at the centre of his investigation, he clears the ground by engaging with the various positions already prevalent in philosophical discourse, in order to establish new rules and norms for a notion of existence equipped to deal with new forms of entities. For him, existence is fundamentally about the realization of logical possibilities within domains of appearances. Existence is neither relative nor the central feature of merely physical objects, and thus, he opens up the possibility to include new kinds of objects in his ontological framework. With his lucid expression and philosophical verve, Kumar provides a bold defense of an inclusive notion of existence that can accommodate emerging entities in the techno-political world. This book is of great value to anyone who has ever thought about existence or will think about it.
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