So ‘ceasing to exist’ would replace ‘dying’. The argument would then be that nothing can cease to exist, and an implicit premise would be that the referent of the subject of a true sentence must exist. Is that true?
I guess the reason it’s tempting to think it’s true in the case of death is that dying is a change in which some particular thing goes from existing to not existing. Yet in the moment the change is complete, there is nothing undergoing any change. So as long as the changing thing (and thus the change) exists, it has not yet died, and if it has died, there is neither a changing thing nor a change.
At the very least, this makes death a very weird kind of change.
So ‘ceasing to exist’ would replace ‘dying’. The argument would then be that nothing can cease to exist, and an implicit premise would be that the referent of the subject of a true sentence must exist. Is that true?
I guess the reason it’s tempting to think it’s true in the case of death is that dying is a change in which some particular thing goes from existing to not existing. Yet in the moment the change is complete, there is nothing undergoing any change. So as long as the changing thing (and thus the change) exists, it has not yet died, and if it has died, there is neither a changing thing nor a change.
At the very least, this makes death a very weird kind of change.