Ecceity, Ipseity and Existents

Although Scotus sometimes seems to teach the opposite, he argues, like his compatriot David Hume will, that existence is really the same as essence. This is a doctrine that makes it easier to understand how, against Aquinas, Scotus can endorse Anselm’s argument for the necessity of the existence of God provided it includes a clause specifying that the concept of the highest thinkable being is free from contradiction. But the assertion of the sameness of essence and existence is not obviously true of finite existents. But it is existence as such to which attention must be given if it is to play the role envisaged for it in the blank ecology sketched out for it in the closing chapters of this book. Here it is sheer existence, not predicates, that ground the author’s hope for a widened and more just notion of ecological responsibility, one that listens to the teachings of Scotus and Hopkins and that holds for all the inscapes of the world simply because a thing’s own existence is a good for that existent and therefore calls for our aesthethical (sic) regard.