“Existence is not a predicate” is a slogan in Anglo–American philosophy. Yet, in English the plain fact is that existence is a predicate. Accordingly, philosophers who use the slogan usually need to take time to explain that existence may be a grammatical predicate, but it is not a “logical” predicate, that is, not a word that “designates” the property of an object. In many African languages, the distinction is unnecessary for, there, existence is not even a grammatical predicate.
More syntactically, the point is that, while in English, a sentence of the structure, “X is”; in the African languages, strict counterparts of such a construction would have no meaning. As Kagame observed of the languages “throughout the Bantu zone” [a remark certainly true beyond those boundaries], “the verb to beis always followed by an attribute or an adjunct of place.” The celebrated African linguistician and metaphysician points out that for this reason Descartes’s “I think therefore I am” would not be...
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Wiredu, K. (2021). Existence. In: Mudimbe, V.Y., Kavwahirehi, K. (eds) Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-2068-5_146
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