In this article, I invite readers to think about what it really means to taste life. I intend this to be an opening to a broader conversation about what it means to be virtuous, to flourish collectively, and even to experience transcendence. Guiding the reader through various existential views and scenarios, I explore the potential to transform both our lives and the fabric of our shared reality. Living such a life entails far more than a mundane and restrained biological, functional existence. In short, we need not ‘merely exist’; we can exist more.

Two forms of existential proposition are identified, one favoured by analytical philosophers, one by Thomists. It is argued, against objections, that both forms were recognized and used by Thomas. A useful way of labelling this point is to speak of the distinction between esse ut verum and esse reale: being in the sense of the true, the analytical notion, on the one hand, and the Thomist notion of actual or real existence on the other. The former is best expressed by a second-level predicable, the latter by a first-level predicable. Both express a valid notion which is fittingly called ‘existential’, and both are, indeed, analogically connected in meaning.

In the second volume of his Systematic Theology, William Lane Craig raises a number of issues against the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, along with several criticisms of Aquinas’s notion of existence. We can’t respond to all of his complaints here – but we can respond to what are, in our estimation, the most fundamental to his case.

Our focus will be on two of the main problems he presses against Aquinas’s view of existence: first, whether it makes sense to talk about existence itself as existing; and second, whether existence comes in degrees. These challenges are closely related – both, ultimately, concern the classical theist claim that God is identical to His own existence – and so our answers will be related as well.

We’ll conclude by raising a challenge for Craig.

We introduce and analyse a variant of the Becker–Döring equations that models the growth of clusters through the gain or loss of monomers. Motivated by enzymatic reactions in biology, this model incorporates irreversible fragmentation and monomers injection. We establish the well-posedness of the equations under suitable conditions on the kinetic rates. Then, as in the Becker–Döring equations, we distinguish two cases for the long-time behaviour of our solution; however, the distinction is made from the constant rate injection of monomers. While under strong fragmentation rate the system may exhibit infinite steady states, we prove that for low injection rate and moderate fragmentation, the solution converges locally exponentially fast to the steady state. Finally, we present an efficient scheme that preserves the asymptotic and allows fast computation by sub-sampling the clusters.

This article articulates and defends an argument for pantheism which has not featured prominently in contemporary philosophy of religion but which is rooted in foundational ideas defended by pantheists and by non-pantheistic theists. It is inspired in part by the idea advocated by some theists that God is existence itself, and in part by the idea associated with pantheistic thinkers such as Śaṅkara that the universe is the “way” that fundamental existence is. Moreover, it is motivated by a simple and attractive view about God’s fundamental nature which might be shared by pantheists and non-pantheists according to which God is the asymmetric source of all else. Beginning from this view about God’s fundamental nature, it argues that God is existence. It then contends that there is therefore a clear and robust sense in which the universe “is” God, since the universe is the “way” existence is.

Samuel Lebens argues that we may understand God’s act of creation by analogy with an author’s creation of fictional characters. I argue that, in the relevant sense of ‘fictional characters’, authors do not create such beings; rather, they invite us to imagine that such beings exist. I also argue that Lebens’s view would make authorship morally problematic in implausible ways. Along the way I briefly offer an account of the being of fictional characters and consider the relations between truth-in-fiction and truth.

We study the well-posedness of solutions to the general nonlinear parabolic equations with merely integrable data in time-dependent Musielak–Orlicz spaces. With the help of a density argument, we establish the existence and uniqueness of both renormalized and entropy solutions. Moreover, we conclude that the entropy and renormalized solutions for this equation are equivalent. Our results cover a variety of problems, including those with Orlicz growth, variable exponents and double-phase growth.

This theoretical paper responds to concerns surrounding the fracturing and opaqueness of the term “sustainability” and the related metaphysical crisis that underpins an existential polycrisis. Drawing on Nietzsche’s work on order and disorder (1873, 1901), Latour’s (2013) philosophical anthropology of modernity and Rosa’s (2019) theory of resonance, the author proposes a way of considering sustainability pluralistically, as a crucial mode of existence amongst others. Revisiting the dualism of subject/object, the author proposes a more implicated, associative way of viewing how humans and non-humans relate, introducing the term sobject: interpolated, entangled being(s). As this mode of existence is explicated, the paper articulates how this could be useful in an educational sense. What is proposed is a way to “zone in” to sustainability with students; a mode through which we can learn to see our connections to and within the world, through which we can actively renew the many-pronged path of Earthly existence. Authentic transformation of dysfunctional existence on Earth, this paper argues, will not arise from harmony or consensus but from engaging the generative dissonances through which we might move beyond perpetual reconsideration of “sustainability” towards the active reconfiguration of how we live, learn and co-create a more inhabitable world.

In this article, we study the $L_p$ Gauss image problem for C-pseudo-cones, where C is a pointed closed convex cone in $\mathbb {R}^n$ with vertex at the origin and having nonempty interior. We first establish the existence of solutions for a Borel measure supported on compact subsets, and then prove a general existence theorem for $p>0$ via approximation. In addition, we prove a uniqueness theorem for $p<0$ under appropriate assumptions.

We study existence and uniqueness of spherically symmetric solutions of

\begin{equation*}S_k(D^2v)+\beta \xi\cdot\nabla v+\alpha v+\left\vert v\right\vert^{q-1}v=0\;\; \mbox{in}\;\; \mathbb{R}^n,\end{equation*}

where $\alpha,\beta$ are real parameters, $n \gt 2,\, q \gt k\geqslant 1$ and $S_k(D^2v)$ stands for the k-Hessian operator of v. Our results are based mainly on the analysis of an associated dynamical system and energy methods. We derive some properties of the solutions of the above equation for different ranges of the parameters α and β. In particular, we describe with precision its asymptotic behaviour at infinity. Further, according to the position of q with respect to the first critical exponent $\frac{(n+2)k}{n}$ and the Tso critical exponent $\frac{(n+2)k}{n-2k}$ we study the existence of three classes of solutions: crossing, slow decay or fast decay solutions. In particular, if k > 1 all the fast decay solutions have a compact support in $\mathbb{R}^n$. The results also apply to construct self-similar solutions of type I to a related nonlinear evolution equation. These are self-similar functions of the form $u(t,x)=t^{-\alpha}v(xt^{-\beta})$ with suitable α and β.

We show that Kim-forking satisfies existence in all NSOP1 theories.