Philosophy and Phenomenologicul Research Vol. LXXIII, No.

2, September 2006

Existence and Predication from Aristotle to Frege

RISTO VILKKO

University of Helsinki
JAAKKO HINTIKKA

Boston University

One of the characteristic features of contemporary logic is that it incorporates the Frege-Russell thesis according to which verbs for being are multiply ambiguous. This thesis was not accepted before the nineteenth century. In Aristotle existence could not serve alone as a predicate term. However, it could be a part of the force of the predicate term, depending on the context. For Kant existence could not even be a part of the force of the predicate term. Hence, after Kant, existence was left homeless. It found a home in the algebra of logic in which the operators corresponding to universal and particular judgments were treated as duals, and universal judgments were taken to be relative to some universe of discourse. Because of the duality, existential quantifier expressions came to express existence. The orphaned notion of existence thus found a new home in the existential quantifier.

How did modem logic evolve? One of the many interesting aspects about this question is that it has not been asked more often and more emphatically even though there is no clear answer to it to be found in the literature. Some philosophers might say that what we today call logic was discovered by Frege in 1879 and add that of course genuine discoveries cannot in the last analysis be explained. If so, we presumably ought to emulate Michael Dummett (1973; 1991) and examine Frege's achievement systematically rather than historically, among other things looking away from its roots in earlier philosophy and earlier logic. However, this way of looking at Frege's accomplishments has been challenged repeatedly, most determinately perhaps by Hans Sluga in his book Gottlob Frege (1980) and by Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker in their Logical Excavations ( 1984). Independently of this particular controversy, one's legitimate curiosity should even after a Dummettian putdown be tickled by the fact that much of the same logic was discovered independently and about the same time by Charles S. Peirce. Is this merely a coincidence? A good historian should not believe in coincidences any more than a good detective.

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Others might prefer to try to trivialize the question. Is not logic one and the same throughout its history? What is supposed to be so novel in Frege and Peirce? The stock answer seems to be: the theory of quantifiers. This theory is the gist of what Frege and Peirce independently discovered. However, it may be objected that quantifiers were studied from the very beginning of Western logic. Already in Aristotles logic the main ingredients were the ideas of universality (every A ) and particularity (some R ) . If this is the main part of the story, the genesis of modern logic should be viewed simply as a continuation of the older traditions in logic which can be traced back ultimately to Aristotle rather than as a discovery of something radically new. This point of view emphasizes that it was Aristotle who laid the foundations to formal logic, whereas Frege was in position only to develop logic further. One reason that some philosophers might have for not examining more closely that background of modern logic is an underestimation of the substantial differences between todays mathematically-oriented logic and traditional philosophically-oriented logic. There nevertheless are differences, some of them quite striking. For example, the usual way of understanding logic merely as the doctrine of the laws of correct inference, that is, as the doctrine of syntax and semantics of explicit languages, would not have appealed even to most of 19th century logicians (see Vilkko 2002). One more specific difference concerns the counterpart or counterparts in a logical notation to natural language verbs for being, such as the English is, the German ist, and the ancient Greek estin. With some exceptions, there has recently been a consensus to the effect that such verbs are multiply ambiguous between the is of predication, the is of existence, the is of identity, a n d the is of subsumption. The assumption of such an ambiguity will be called here the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis, for indeed the currency of this assumption is due largely to these two logicians. It is built into the very notations that have been used in logic since their time, in that the allegedly different meanings are expressed in the usual logical notations differently. The i s of identity is expressed by the identity sign a = 6 , the is of predication by juxtaposition, or, more accurately speaking, by a singular terms filling the argument slot of a predicative expression P(a), the is of existence by the existential quantifier ( 3 ) P ( x ) , and the is of subsumption by a general conditional of the form (Vx)(x E S 3 x E P ) . In a introductory logic course students are not only taught to use this notation but given to understand that the corresponding distinctions are an unavoidable aspect of all valid logic. It is highly important to understand what the precise import of the Frege-Russell thesis is. It is often presented as an eternal and immutable logical truth that any logician at any stage of the history of logic heeded or ought to have heeded. For example, there are scholars who have criticized Plato for not distinguishing the is of predication from the is of identity. When Michael Frede (1967)

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argued, in his Pradikation und Existenzaussage, that Plato did not, in the Sophist, distinguish predicative and existential senses of estin from each other, at least one reviewer took him to accuse Plato of a major logical blunder. In this essay, we shall concentrate on the predicative and existential senses of the verb is and largely disregard the development of the other senses. Any historical discussion of the central questions of logic will have to be conducted against the background of Aristotle's logic, and we shall accordingly start with a brief analysis of his treatment of verbs for being. This leads immediately into philosophical questions, The attribution of the Frege-Russell thesis to earlier philosophers, including ancient Greek ones, has been encouraged by what is known among classicists as Hermann's rule (Hermann 1801: 84-85). What it purports to do is to use the Greek accent system to make some of the Frege-Russell distinctions in ancient Greek language. In the beginning of the 19th century the German philologist Gottfried Hermann drew a distinction between the signification which requires existence as an additional predicate and the signification which already contains the predicate. According to Charles Kahn, the former was expressed by means of the enclitic accent ( ~ T Iwhile ) , the latter one was expressed by the orthotone accent ( ~ ( J T I on ) the first syllable (Kahn 1972: 420). The reason why Hermann's rule favors the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis is that on each occasion it allows only one of the alleged Frege-Russell senses to be present. Hence it is easily taken to imply an ambiguity between separate senses of estin. It might nevertheless seem easy to dismiss Hermann's rule as irrelevant. It is not controversial to maintain that verbs for being have different uses. What the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis amounts to is a proposal to explain these differences in use as being due to the ambiguity of these verbs, that is, to their having several separate meanings rather than, e.g., differences due to the context. Why could we not simply claim that Hermann's rule is a way of highlighting unproblematic differences in use? A rejection of the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis allows for the possibility that in some contexts we cannot distinguish the allegedly different Frege-Russell meanings from each other and perhaps are forced to say that more than one alleged Frege-Russell meaning is present there. Indeed, Jaakko Hintikka (1979; 1983) has argued for the former possibility in terms of a game-theoretical treatment of the semantics of is. What is more, we will see that the latter situation can be found in Aristotle. We shall return to Hermann's rule later on. In view of the widespread acceptance of the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis it may be surprising to realize, as Hintikka (1979) has pointed out, that the Frege-Russell thesis is not an unavoidable part of either logic or the semantics of natural language. What is true is that natural language verbs for

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being are used in several different ways. What the thesis does is to attribute those differences in use to an ambiguity of a single word, instead of for instance construing them as being due to differences in the context in which a verb for being occurs. Hintikka has in fact presented an explicit semantical treatment of English quantifiers and a number of related notions within the framework of game-theoretical semantics without assuming the Frege-Russell thesis. (See Hintikka & Kulas 1985.) He has also pointed out that in some particular cases the Frege-Russell thesis distinction simply cannot be made, and also showed that the game-theoretical treatment of natural language quantifiers is closely related to Aristotle's doctrine of categories. What is also striking and what makes these issues relevant to the history of philosophy and history of logic is the fact that no philosopher before the nineteenth century embraced the Frege-Russell thesis. Admittedly, attempts have been made to find some of the Frege-Russell distinctions in Plato, among others by Ackrill (1957) and by van Eck (2000). These attempts have been persuasively criticized among others by Frede (1967) and by Brown (an unpublished lecture). These discussions have been obscured by the same mson as the import of Hermann's rule, viz. by a failure to distinguish a words having different uses from its having different meanings, that is, from its being ambiguous. What is more, almost no earlier philosopher even seems to have considered the Frege-Russell distinction as a possible position. An exception is Aristotle, who in his Metaphysics does consider the relation of assertions of predication, existence and identity to each other, only to reject any sharp distinction, writing as follows:
...'one man' and 'man' are the same thing, so are 'existent man' and 'man',and the doubling of the words in 'one man and one existent man' does not express anything different... and similarly 'one existent man' adds nothing to 'existent man'... (Met. IV, 1003b 26-31.)

Thus Aristotle in effect rejects the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis. In a full Aristotelian use of estin, the first three Frege-Russell senses are present as components of a single unambiguous force of estin. This leads Aristotle into difficulties because the different Frege-Russell senses behave differently vis-8vis different logical rules. For instance, identity is transitive, while predication is not always transitive. Part of the way Aristotle tries to cope with these problems is to admit that on different occasions different Frege-Russell senses may be absent from the force of estin. For instance, if I say 'Homer is a poet' ("Opqpos ~ T TTIT O I ~ T ~ ~ S it)does , not imply 'Homer is' ( " O ~ ~ r p o $ ~OTI(V)) which in the ancient Greek would have been a way of saying 'Homer exists.' (See De int. 11, 21a 20-30.) Here is the existential component of the former occurrence of estin. Scholars have in fact tried to puzzle out when it is that Aristotle assumes the existential force to be present. For instance, J. L.

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Ackrill (1963) has criticized the Homer example exactly because of its confusing nature with regard to existential import. Scott Carson (2000) has defended the importance of this example for its context in De interpretatione and claimed that it lays stress on certain highly important aspects concerning the nature of the verb to be in ancient Greek philosophy. Hintikka and Halonen (2000), in their turn, have argued that the presence of existential force in a potential syllogistic premise may not depend on this premise alone, but on the stage of the process of constructing an Aristotelian science which we are considering. Likewise, in a syllogistic premise like every B is A the verb for being can either have existential force or not. Whether or not it does depends on the term A . In this sense, in any syllogistic science, existential import commitments are carried by the predicate terms of syllogistic premises. This import can accordingly be proved by means of an ordinary syllogism as one of its by-products. In other words, Aristotle could argue as it were as follows: every B is an A (and exists) every C is B
ergo: every C is an A (and exists)

Here B need not be assumed to have existential force. In contrast, the following pattern does not represent a valid syllogism according to Aristotles lights: every B exists and is an A every C is a B (and exists)
ergo: every C is an A

(and exists)

Hence, in a syllogistic science existence need to be assumed only for the widest (generic) term characterizing the purview of that science. For all other terms in that science, existence can be proved syllogistically. And this is precisely what Aristotle says in his Analytica posteriora (A 10, 76a 31-37; B 7, 92b 12-23). Whether or not the predicate term of given syllogistic premise of an Aristotelian science can be assumed to have existential force therefore depends on whether the scientist has already proved this force, as Hintikka and Halonen (2000) have argued.

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What this means is that in Aristotelian scientific statements, i.e. syllogistic premises, the existential force was canied by the predicate term. In this sense, existence was for Aristotle a predicate or, rather, a part of the force of a predicate. This force depends on the context. Existence could not serve alone as a predicate term, but this was only because it would have been too broad a term, not restricted to any one category and hence not an essence of anything. In so many words: Existence is not the ousia of anything (An. post. B 7 , 92b 13-15). This statement calls for an explanation. The usual translation of ousia (ojaia) is essence, and hence the quoted passage might seem to say merely that mere existence does not distinguish the properties of any class of entities from those of the others. However, Aristotles reasons for his statement are quite different. For Aristotle, an essential predication is one that specifies the class of entities to which it applies. Existence cannot be an essence of anything, because all existing entities would form a class comprehending entities from different categories. And such classes are for Aristotle conceptually impossible, for the categories are precisely the largest classes that we can coherently consider. In order to avoid misunderstandings, it may be in order to point out that we are employing the term existential force in a sense different from its most common use to indicate the nonemptiness of a term. Here it means the presence of the existential sense of a verb for being. In a syllogistic context, it amounts to the claim that all (possible) instances of a term actually exist. Since predicatively used terms did not always have existential force, the Aristotelian quantification phrase for some did not express actual existence. If Aristotelian syllogistic was translated into modern logical notation and interpreted in the same way as this notation, particular quantifier phrases could only be taken to range over some kind of merely possible objects, not necessarily over any existing ones. But it is not the only remarkable fact here that in Aristotles syllogistic logic the predicate term carries some of the existential force of a judgment. An equally remarkable fact here is that it carries in some sense and with certain qualifications all of the existential force. One qualification needed in this statement is that it has to be restricted to actual existence. Aristotelian quantifier phrases like every B or some C should not in the first place be thought of as modern quantifiers ranging over the class of Bs or the class of Cs, much less over the class of all actually existing entities of the appropriate category. When Aristotle puts forward a syllogistic premise like every B is A, he does not mean merely that every actually existing B is A . If we tried to think anachronistically of Aristotles syllogistic premises in terms of quantifiers ranging over certain entities, we would have to say that their values are some sorts of possible individuals. However, this is not how Aristotle looked

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upon his syllogistic premises. For him, they expressed primarily relations of the forms expressed by the subject and the predicate. A premise like every B is A says that it is a fact about the form expressed by the term B that it is always accompanied by the form expressed by A . And since a premise like every B is A is thus thought of as dealing in the first place with relations of forms, the sets of entities instantiating these forms become largely irrelevant. The force of such a premise certainly is not exhausted by speaking of relations of inclusion between the set of entities actually satisfying B and the set of entities actually satisfying A . Hence the twentieth-century logical notation, which is based on the idea of quantifiers ranging over a class of values, can be applied to Aristotle only with considerable care. It may be true that Aristotles logic, like modem logic, dealt with quantifiers, as we have already seen. But what we have seen shows that he dealt with them in a way radically different from ours, in particular as far as the relation of quantifiers to the ideas of actual existence and actual universality are concerned. This analysis of Aristotles logical assumptions puts into perspective one of the major questions concerning the origins of twentieth-century logic. Even though the development of modern logic certainly cannot be seen as a tree growing from a single seed, as Volker Peckhaus (2000) has recently written, it has become commonplace to say that the starting point of modem logic is the discovery of quantifiers by Frege in 1879 and by Peirce during the early 1880s. Among other scholars, W. V. Quine (1995) has dated modem logic from here. According to him, logic became a substantial branch of mathematics only with the emergence of general theory of quantification. But what can be meant by the discovery of quantifiers? Quantifiers are roughly speaking the logical counterparts to the expressions for every and for some. But the behavior of such expressions were part and parcel of what Aristotle was trying to study in his syllogistic. Hence we face the question: What else is new here? Aristotle already studied quantifiers, how could they be the great novelty of Freges and Peirces logic? Here a contrastive comparison with Aristotle shows what the so-called discovery of quantifiers really amounted to. Earlier it was seen that according to him in a premise of a scientific syllogism the existential force (if any) was carried by and large by the predicate term. The particular quantifier of Aristotelian logic was not for him really an existential quantifier. In Frege and his successors the existential force was canied by and large by the existential quantifier. One reason for the second qualification is that in Frege and most of his immediate successors existential force was also carried by singular terms like proper names, which were assumed to be nonempty. This unnecessary assumption was eliminated when logicians began to develop, in the late

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1950s, so-called free logics, beginning with Hintikka (1959), and Leblanc and Hailperin (1959). The essential novelty of Freges new logic is therefore not the notion of quantifier but the location of the existential import in a logical formula. In the form of a suggestive but oversimplified slogan, one can say that for Aristotle existential import was carried by the predicate term while for the moderns it is camed by the existential quantifier. This is crucial difference between Aristotelian logic and modern logic. The profound character of this difference cannot be exaggerated. There are reasons to be deeply skeptical in most cases about presumed cases of conceptual incommensurability of scientific, mathematical or logical theories. Here we nonetheless have a fairly clear example where the same words are used so differently in two theories that no direct comparison of the two theories is possible. Yet there is no insuperable difficulty about discussing both of them rationally and even relating them to each other in more complex ways. Now how did this fundamental change come about? In order to answer this question, it is helpful to use as a clue the question of the development of an apparently different aspect of contemporary logic, viz. of the Frege-Russell thesis of the ambiguity of verbs for being. This thesis is sometimes attributed to Kant. In his book Kants Analytic (1966), Jonathan Bennett goes so far as to speak of the Kant-Frege thesis. He claims that the quantified treatment of existence-statements, formalized by Frege a century later, was largely pioneered by Kant in the Dialectic (p. 199). This attribution is inappropriate in the literal sense of the thesis. Kant never claimed that verbs for being like the German ist are ambiguous. Indeed, in addition to the notions of existence (Dasein, Existenz), being (Sein), and is (ist), one finds from his vocabulary also the unambiguous notion of positing ( setzen). Already in 1763 Kant declared that the notion of positing is quite simple and altogether of one kind with the notion of being (Kant 1763: 73), and later, in the First Critique, he wrote that
Beingis obviously not a real predicate; that is, it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing, or of certain determinations, as existing in themselves. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment. The proposition, Codis omnipotent, contains two concepts, each of which has its object-God and omnipotence. The small word is adds no new predicate, but only serves to posit the predicate in its relation to the subject. (KrV, B626-627.)

This implies among other things that God is omnipotent does not logically imply for Kant that God is. What is more, in the title of the first paragraph of the aforementioned precritical essay of 1763 Kant puts it short and clear: Existence is by no means a predicate or a determination of any particular thing (Kant 1763: 72; cf. Hintikka 1981).

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The distinction between predication and Existenzaussage was for Kant a difference between two uses of the notion of being-a relative and an absolute one. This is not only different from the distinction of Frege and Russell; it is incompatible with their distinction. It is often said that Kant rejected the idea that existence is a predicate. In a strictly literal sense, this marks no difference from Aristotle, for whom existence could not be the essence of anything. But there is a fundamental difference between the two. Existence could not be a predicate for Aristotle because it was too general a notion not restricted to any one category, i. e . , to any one class ofpredicabilia as any decent predicate must. In contrast, if we examine what Kant meant, we can see that his claim was far stronger than what the slogan existence is not a predicate expresses. He argued that existence cannot even be a part of the force of a predicate term. As he put it, existence does not add anything to the concept expressed by the predicate. Hence, in a judgment of existential, e.g. God exists, a subject is taken as it was ready made with its essential predicates and merely assert that this particular complex of predicates is in fact instantiated in reality. As Hintikka has written: Here existence is not one of the configurations of predicates; it is what is asserted of the configuration (Hintikka 1981: 134). Still other aspects of Kants philosophy are relevant here. The history of the interrelation of the ideas of existence and predication is connected with the history of the theory of categories. In Aristotle, his theory of categories encourages strongly the idea that the existential and predicative uses of verbs for being are parallel. But what precisely is his theory? The answer is not obvious, and it is not even obvious what it is that his categories are supposed to categorize. The distinction between the different categories appears sometimes in Aristotle as a distinction between the largest genera whose members we can consider together (see, e.g., Met. IV, 1003b 19-20; An. post. A 22, 83b, 10-17). If so, different categories mark different uses of existence and presumably also different uses of identity. These different uses are held together only by a dependence on one particular type of being, viz. the being of substances. But sometimes the distinction appears to separate the different things that we can predicate of an object (Cut. 4). Categories thus seem to be the different kinds of predicabilia, and in different categories we therefore seem to be dealing with different varieties of predication. At other times Aristotle correlates the category distinction with a distinction between the different question words of the ancient Greek, to the extent of using question words and phrases as labels of the different categories (Top. I, 9). Which one of these does Aristotle really mean? Scholars have defended strikingly different learned opinions on this point. For example, Adolf Trendelenburg (1846) d considered Aristotles categories above all as the most general predicates, a Hermann Bonitz (1853) as the largest genera of entities. Jaakko Hintikka

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(1986), in his turn, has analyzed the question from the vantage point of the logic of quantifiers as it is incorporated in natural languages. He has been led in this way to the answer: all of the above. In the logic of natural language, at least of such natural languages as English and Greek, the semantics of quantifier phrases forces these apparently different distinctions to be parallel. (Ibid., 96-103.) This parallelism made it natural for Aristotle to think that the existential and the predicative senses of einai-if they are different senses in the first p l a c e d o go together. When they do not, for instance, when the existential predicative and identificatory senses exhibit different logical behaviour, paradoxes come about. How Aristotle dealt with them, is a story for another occasion. Thus in Aristotle, the category distinctions do not separate the allegedly different Frege-Russell senses of being from each other. Rather, they separate the parallel uses of einai in one category from their uses in another category. There is nothing that disallows one and the same use of a verb like einai to carry both an existential force and a predicative force as long as these two forces are compatible categorially. Existence is not a predicate for Aristotle, not because existence and predication are categorially different, but because existence is used in all the different categories, and hence is not one of the legitimate category bound predicabilia. The upshot is an Aristotelian universe which is split up into different largest classes of beings. In different classes of such kind, that is, in different categories, different things can be said of its members, and their members are identified differently. This overall picture changes radically when we move to Kants theory of categories. Kant says that he is in his theory doing the same thing as Aristotle (KrV, B105), but it is not clear what he means by that statement. It is perhaps good to keep in mind that evidently Kants knowledge of Aristotle was mostly based on such rather inadequate textbooks as Jacob Bruckers Historia critica philosophie (1742-1744). Indeed, according to Peter Petersen, after Melanchthon and before Trendelenburg there was no significant A r i s totle-reception (Petersen 1913: 124-138). One possible answer in any case is that Kant is, like Aristotle, concerned with the different kinds of questions that we can raise about the world. But in Kant these differences between different questions do not merely reflect the objective differences between the different realms of being that we might be talking about. They are differences between different questions I must ask in order to integrate the messages that my senses convey to me into a body of my knowledge. In Kants phrase, we are in the category distinctions dealing with distinctions between different pure concepts of understanding which apply a priori to objects of intuition in general (KrV, B105). They correspond to different logical functions in all possible judgments (zbid.). A comparison with Aristotle shows remarkable

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differences. In so far different Kantian categories correspond to different kinds of questions. The answers to questions show up in different aspects of the logical form of all propositions. They are not questions that can be only about a certain genus of entities, as Aristotelian categorial questions. They are questions that arise in connection with any judgment. The crucial difference between Aristotle and Kant for our present purposes concerns the status of questions of existence and predication in Kant's theory. The difference is that in Kant questions of existence and questions of inherence and subsistence belong to different categories: the former to the category of modality and the latter to the category of relation. Hence, no logical function can express both. Consequently existence is not only not a predicate, it cannot be a part of the force of any predicate. All this necessitated a radical reinterpretation of the semantics of syllogistic premises. For one thing, predication and existence had to be distinguished from each other. However, it was not obvious how to conceptualize the relation of the two. Maybe they were not two meanings of a single word, but they were not obviously two components of the meaning of a single unambiguous word, either. What is crucial, the existential force (if any) of a syllogistic premise became an orphan. It could no longer be imported to the meaning of the premise by the predicate term. And it was seen that in Aristotelian logic, the particular quantifier did not necessarily express actual existence, either. Kant's influence makes understandable the problem situation in which thinkers found themselves in the early nineteenth century. They had to keep apart the existential and the predicative uses of verbs for being, whether or not they were inclined to freeze the distinction into an ambiguity of a single word or not. This problem situation was not restricted to professional philosophers, either. A case in point is the aforementioned Hermann's rule. We are now able to see what there is to be said about it. Around the turn of the 19th century, under the influence of Kant's philosophy, Hermann was projecting the sharp distinction between the different uses of verbs for being back to the Greeks. But the variety of such a projection depends on there actually being a sharp distinction present in ancient writers, including the major Greek philosophers. Hence, Hermann's rule cannot be used as evidence for the presence of the Frege-Russel1 distinction in ancient Greek philosophers. Instead, the unmistakable absence of any such distinction in writers like Aristotle should make us wary of the historical accuracy of Hermann's rule. On the other hand we must acknowledge that Hermann's rule was already anticipated by some Byzantine scholars whose motivation was of course not philosophical. Their concern seems to have been at least partly phonetic rather than semantical, which reduces the interest of their distinction for the purposes of the history of philosophy.

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If the situation into which Kant had thrust all thinkers was thus felt outside philosophy, it is only to be expected that it was perceived independently and more or less simultaneously by several different philosophers. One way of trying to cope with it is to make the Frege-Russell distinction, or some part of it. Thus it is not at all surprising to find parts of Frege-Russell thesis put forward by De Morgan, Peirce, and quite likely still others. Freges new logic was therefore not in all respects a unique discovery that could have been made by a genius like Frege at any time. His distinctions between allegedly different senses of being were made very much in a particular historical situation. As Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker have said, if Frege had not made the decisive breakthrough in 1879, others would have made it along the same line within his lifetime (and nobody had been in a position to do so significantly earlier) (Baker & Hacker 1984: 16). It was no accident that Freges philosophical education (such as it was) was almost exclusively Kantian. Hans Sluga (1980) has it right: it is important to realize that both Freges logical and philosophical ideas had their ancestry. These coincidences are not really coincidences. They become even less surprising when we note that for logicians there existed an obvious way of finding a home to the orphaned existential force, even in the case of syllogistic premises. This way was to assign it exclusively to the particular quantifier expression, which was thus turned into our now familiar existential quantifier. This transfer was further encouraged by other facts. For mathematicians like Augustus De Morgan and George Boole, universality came to mean universality in some universe of discourse which is the ultimate subject of the discourse. In virtue of the duality of the universally and particularly quantified statements reflected in their interdefinability, this meant that the particular statements came to express existence in the same universe. Admittedly, Jean van Heijenoort (1967) has said that Booles logic did not have much ontological import. This has to be understood in the right way. The telltale notion in Boole is the notion of the universe of discourse. By this he did not mean the actual universe but whatever system of objects we choose to speak about. In his 1847 mathematical analysis of logic Boole understood the universe as comprehending
every conceivable class of objects whether actually existing or not, it being premised that the same individual may be found in more than one class, inasmuch as it may possess more than one quality in common with other individuals. (Boole 1847: 15.)

Thus, Booles universe is the only class which contains all the individuals that exist in any class. This is in perfect agreement with De Morgans notion of the universe of discourse. In his Formal Logic (1847), which was published almost simultaneously with Booles Mathematical Analysis of Logic, De Morgan characterized the universe as a range of ideas which is either

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expressed or understood as containing the whole matter under consideration, i e . , merely the whole of which we are considering parts (ibid., 38). In his greatest work, An Investigation ofthe Laws of Thought (1854), Boole refined his conception of the universe and wrote that whatever may be the extent of the field within which all the objects of our discourse are found, that field may properly be termed the universe of discourse (ibid., 42). What is more, in his late manuscript Logic and Reasoning, which was probably a sketch for an introduction to a nonmathematical exposition of the basic ideas of the Luws of Thought, Boole says short and clear that the limiting conceptions of universe and nothing express simply the ideas of existence and nonexistence (Boole 1952: 218). Rush Rhees has claimed that this was a late change, and that there may be important reasons for it (Boole 1952: 30). Indeed, this was an important change but it was not as late as Rhees likes to suggest. Boole did express the is of existence by x = 1 for Something exists and respectively x = 0 for Something does not exist already in his Investigation of the Laws of Thought (Boole 1854: 189-190). In any case, it is interesting to compare this late definition of the universe as expressing simply the idea of existence to the earlier 1847 definition, where the universe covered every class of objects whether actually existing or not. All in all, what Boole had in mind with his notion of the universe of discourse was that logical truths do not convey any information about the actual world, since they are calculated to apply to any old universe of discourse. But applied to one such domain the universal quantifier expresses universality and the existential quantifier expresses existence with respect to the given domain. After Kant and before Frege the most far reaching development in logical theory was the algebra of logic and theory of relations that originated around the mid-19th century with Boole and De Morgan. The following two ideas came to the forefront. First, the operators corresponding to the syllogistical standard forms of universal and particular judgments were treated as duals. Second, universal judgments were taken to be relative to some universe of discourse, and were inevitably taken as the nonexistence of exceptions in that domain. But because of the duality, existential quantifier expressions came to express existence. Boole differed from todays notation of Boolean algebra only in his use of the unnecessary elective symbol v to denote some (thus, e.g., x = vy reads X is some y). The orphaned notion of existence thus found a home, no longer in the predicative is but in the existential quantifier. This helps in explaining the independent discovery of quantifiers by Frege in 1879 and by Peirce in the early 1880s. If De Morgans achievements seem insignificant from todays perspective, it is because Booles novel and successful ideas resulted in logic taking a totally new direction. What is more, whereas Booles notation became widely

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recognized, De Morgans notation soon fell out of date. Undoubtedly Boole was a more original thinker than De Morgan. In G. C. Smiths words, [Boole] chose interesting and important topics, had new ideas to express about them, and communicated these incisively. De Morgan, on the other hand, often wrote at great length without quite reaching the heart of the matter, although what he had to say contained interesting-often vividly expressed-remarks (Smith 1982: 121). One historical question concerns the level of Booles and De Morgans knowledge about the previous achievements in the field of logic. Both of them became exceptionally well educated by different routes. Their correspondence, for instance, provides good evidence for both of them having been quite well informed about the previous developments in the field of logic (see Smith 1982). However, Boole did not, for example, know about Leibnizs pioneering results in logical calculi. What about Kant, then? Kants most important works were well available in any decent university library and both De Morgan and Boole mastered the German language. Moreover, their contributions contain remarks on what Kant had to say about, e.g., categories, hypothetical propositions, or the theory of syllogistic reasoning. However, the only definite reference (Boole 1854: 239) is made to the so-called JiischeLogik (Kant 1800). In other words, the only definite reference is to a secondary source which did not originate from Kants hand only, but also from notes and remarks of his colleagues and students who attended his lectures. Indeed, Terry Boswell(1988) has traced the Jiische-Logik back to four different sources: (1) students notes, (2) Kants own reflections on logic, (3) Gottlob Benjamin Jasches editorial additions, and (4) material from Georg Meiers Auszug uus der Vernunftlehre (1752), which Kant used as manual during his lectures. Although authorized by Kant himself, the Jusche-Logik is an unreliable source to Kants logic. De Morgan seems to have been very sensitive with regard to semantical issues, perhaps even more sensitive than Boole. For example, in a letter to Boole on February Ist, 1862, De Morgan criticized Sir William Hamiltons use of the term some, distinguished three different senses of this term, and claimed that Hamilton had completely confused them (Smith 1982: 87). However, of more importance for our story was his scrutiny of the verb is in his Formal Logic (1847). In the third chapter of his Formal Logic De Morgan discusses first the general characteristics of the terms of a proposition, as wanted for the abstract forms of inference, and concentrates thereafter on those of the connecting copulae is and is not. He sums up the most common uses of the verb is as follows (ibid.,53):
( 1 ) Absolute identity, as in The thing he sold you is the one I sold him;

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(2) Agreement in a certain particular or particulars understood, as in He is a Caucasian said of a European in reference to the color of his skin; (3) Possession of a quality, as in The rose is red; and (4)Reference of a species to its genus, as in Man is an animal.

Here we in effect have the Frege-Russell distinction before Frege and Russell. De Morgan also pointed out that all these uses are independent of the use of the verb alone, i.e., of the is of existence, as in the expression Man is (i.e. exists). In all these senses, as well as in all such senses which might be added consistently with the aforementioned conditions, some propositions sometimes admit of having the sense of i s shifted, and some do not. Thus, in the case of negative propositions it is always possible to reduce the is of agreement in particulars into that of identity by alteration of the predicate. For example, if No A is B in color, then absolutely No A is B. However, Every A is B in color does not give Every A is B. But the first pair might be connected by a syllogism. (Ibid., 53.) De Morgans idea of a shift in the sense of is is an interesting one, and deserves more attention than it has received. It is not even clear whether the shift fails i n universal premises for logical reasons. It may be mentioned that in the Finnish language there is a construction more generally applicable than De Morgans which can perhaps be thought of as implementing the kind of shift De Morgan is considering. It is illustrated by the following groups of synonyms:
Lippu on punainen Lippu on vj:rilaj:n punainen Lipun vari on punainen The flag is red The flag is red in color The color of the flag is red

Han on suomalainen Hln on kansalaisuudeltaan suomalainen Hln on Suomen kansalainen

He is a Finn or He is Finnish He is a Finn by nationality ur His nationality is Finnish He is a Finnish national

Hanen nimensj: on Samuel Han on nimeltlln Samuel

His name is Samuel He is Samuel by name

In the last group we are obviously dealing with the identity sense of is. The relevant construction can be used also in general statements. More discussion is nevertheless needed here. To return to De Morgan, within a few pages of his Formal Logic (49-54) he manages to write about the different senses, the different meanings, and the different uses of the verb i s . Even thought he clearly had a sharp sight with regard to semantical nuances, it seems as if he did not have a clear opinion about whether the differences in the use of the verb is are due to the multiple ambiguity of a single word or differences in the context in which it occurs.
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The third use of verbs for being, the identity sense, became prominent when relations and functions were included among the notions studied in logic. In Aristotelian syllogistic, it did not make much difference whether a phrase like some women are wise was in effect parsed as some women are identical with members of the class of wise people or some women have the predicate of wisdom. But relational expressions like the teacher of Alexander the Great could not be accommodated in this way. The situation in logic was correctly perceived to be like the situation in algebra, where identities and predications had to be distinguished from one another. This development was connected with the gradual change of the notion of relation from a relational predicate (e.g. a brother) to a genuine entity linking its two terms. (On this use of the verb is, see Hintikka, forthcoming.) The fourth alleged Frege-Russell meaning, the is of subsumption, was promoted-or necessitated-by the categorical articulation of the reality described in a logical language into individuals, their properties and relations, possibly properties and relations of properties and relations, and so on. A sharp form of this articulation was Freges distinction between saturated entities (objects) and unsaturated entities (functions). Such articulation was not peculiar to Frege, but foreshadowed in the tradition of the algebra of logic. Many philosophers have seen in this categorical articulation the crucial step in the genesis of modem logic. Be the justification of this claim as it is, on the level of actual logical rules a related change is more conspicuous. It is the breakup of what Russell called denoting phrases in the logical notation. For instance, when every man is mortal is expressed as (Vn)(x is a man 3 x is mortal), the phrase every man disappears altogether as a whole. Every goes into (Vx) and man becomes the predicate term of the antecedent. This led to introduction of bound variables, which do not have any counterpart in natural languages. In a historical perspective, this distance between logical and natural languages mean in effect that it was not immediately clear that logical notation, for instance the first-order notation, could actually express the same things as ordinary discourse. Frege claimed such universality for his Begrzffssschrift, but did little to demonstrate it or to illustrate it. He did not even emphasize that quantifiers could serve to define (a la Weierstrass) the basic concepts of analysis such as continuity and differentiability. A large part of the argumentation needed to persuade philosophers of the expressibility was in fact carried out by Russell, culminating in his famous essay On Denoting of 1905. Russell even said that the distinction we have associated with his name (and Freges) marks the first real progress in logic since the days of the Greeks. He was not right in the sense that the distinction is not an eternal truth about all possible logics ready to be carved in stone. However, there may be a large

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grain of truth in Russells boast. In a deeper sense enhanced awareness of the different uses of verbs for being and of their differences means genuine progress in our understanding of logic.

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We wish to acknowledge our debt for insightful, constructive comments to Myles Burnyeat, Russell Dancy, Juliet Floyd, Charles Kahn, Simo Knuuttila, and Volker Peckhaus, among others that we may be here forgetting.

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