Mr. Irving's archetypal hero is Garp, whose mother dominates his existence, having conceived him on top of a comatose airman, and his novels are full of male characters with strong mothers and absent fathers.
What we at our Newtonian level of existence necessarily conceive of as a substantial reality is in fact - in fact! - a play of spume upon a roiling sea of particles.
Although the interpretation of Plato's theory remains a matter of scholarly controversy, there is no doubt that his promulgation of it initiated an enduring dispute about the existence of universals often conceived, in opposition to particulars, as entities, such as general properties, which may be wholly present at different times and places or instantiated by many distinct particular objects.
A common approach along these lines takes the fundamental notion to be that of bringing about existence, which is conceived of as a relation between two things.
In this case, Giles radicalizes Aquinas' doctrine of the real distinction, asserting that existence must be conceived as a "res addita" [thing added] to essence.
Impossible things seem to be non-existent insofar as they are not properly conceived (intellectual existence is distinct from imaginative existence: Michot 1987; Black 1997, 1999).
The arguments propose that only the existence of God as orthodoxly conceived could support the existence of moral order in the universe, so God must exist.
The ideal mode of being is a timeless mode of existence suitable for platonistically conceived numbers; the real mode of being is that of contingent spatio-temporal entities such as the realist assumes ordinary rocks and trees to be; while the purely intentional mode of being is that occupied by fictional characters and other entities which owe their existence and nature to acts of consciousness.
But, says Hume, for any being whose existence we can conceive, we can also conceive its nonexistence, and thus there isn't a necessary being.
William Hasker (1999) goes one step further in arguing for the existence of the mind conceived as a non-composite substance which 'emerges' from the brain at a certain point in its development.
