The best-known - most often cited - objection to ontological arguments is encapsulated in the Kantian slogan ‘Existence is not a predicate’. I have already argued that Kant himself did not provide an adequate explanation - justification - of the critique that he supposed to be embodied in this claim. In this chapter, I propose to argue that the many subsequent attempts to explain the content of the claim have fared no better. I shall also suggest, albeit tentatively, that there is a straightforward sense in which existence is a predicate - and that this sense is all that defenders of ontological arguments need to invoke in order to defend themselves against the neo-Kantian onslaught.

REAL PREDICATES

As Barnes (1972) notes, the point of the slogan ‘Existence is not a predicate’ is not claim that finite parts of the verb ‘to exist’ do not function as grammatical predicates in sentences that are in subject predicate form. After all, that claim would seem to be falsified immediately by the existence of sentences of the form ‘a exists’ where a belongs to the category of singular terms, namely, proper names, definite descriptions, demonstratives, indexicals, pronominal compound expressions. Barnes suggests that this argument should be treated with care, since grammarians have no agreed canons for the division of sentences into subject and predicate.