English

Noun

inexistence ‎(usually uncountable, plural inexistences)

1. The state of not being, not existing, or not being perceptible.
   • 1648, Robert Boyle, Seraphic Love, 1997 Kessinger ed. edition, ISBN 1564590089, page 57:

     Our inexistence indeed was a condition, wherein nothing in us was capable of being a motive of God's love; but our enmity proceeded further, and made us worthy of his detestation; […]

   • 1941, Giuseppe di Gioia, Swift are the Shadows, page 78:

     In order to prove the inexistence of God, he challenged Him to strike him down in five minutes while timing himself with a watch.

   • 2007, Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Sinthome, A Mixture of Symptom and Fantasy”, in The Later Lacan, ISBN 0791469972, page 57:

     Axiomatics (namely, that everything that will be used for the purposes of a demonstration is explained) does nothing more than formalizing this wiping clean — in other words, inexistence is posed as the condition for necessity to emerge.

2. The state of existing in something
   • 1663, Isaac Barrow, “A Defence of the Blessed Trinity”, in The Theological Works of Isaac Barrow, published 1830, page 188:

     that there is a mutual inexistence of one in all, and all in one; […]

   • 1854, Christopher Walton, Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of the Celebrated Divine and Theosopher: William Law, page 207:

     She distinguished as to this, the inexistence in God from eternity, and the figurative manifestation in time.

   • 2005, Louis Dupre, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture, ISBN 0300113463, page 303:

     Berkeley's theory of the creature's permanent inexistence in God evoked a suspicion of pantheism.

3. That which exists within; a constituent.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of A. Tucker to this entry?)

Usage notes

• In modern philosophical writing, this is chiefly used with the sense "nonexistence" as a literal translation or calque of a corresponding term in another European language, such as the German Inexistenz or the Spanish inexistencia.

Synonyms

• (not existing): nonexistence, absence, lack
• (existing within): inherence

Related terms

• inexistent

French

Noun

inexistence f ‎(plural inexistences)

1. inexistence