Logical being denotes a mode of being of its own for purely logical units of meaning — concepts, propositions, inferences, forms of inference. Alexander Pfänder analyzed this sphere deeply in his Logik (4th ed. 2000); Roman Ingarden and Josef Seifert (2014) introduce it as an independent mode of being alongside real, ideal, possible, and intentional being.
Logical entities are not real things (they have no space and no time), not ideal essences (they are not the essences of real things), not fictional objects (they do not depend on a constituting act), and not mere possibilities. A syllogism, a concept, a proposition have their own mode of being: they are units of meaning with their own structural features (capacity for truth, validity, consistency).
Demarcation from realism: Even in logical being, objective structures hold — the principle of non-contradiction, the modus-ponens schema, the subject-predicate form. These are not subjective conventions, but objective constitutions of the logical domain.
For the personhood ontology, the demarcation is important: persons exist in real being (German), not in the logical. Concepts of persons, statements about persons, inferences about persons are logical entities — but persons themselves are not units of meaning.
Ontological classification:
- Superordinate concept: mode of being
- Disjoint with: real being (German), ideal being (German), possible being (German), intentional being
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (German)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Seifert, J. (2014): Ontological Categories: On Their Distinction from Transcendentals, Modes of Being, and Logical Categories, Anuario Filosófico 47(2), pp. 338–340.
- Pfänder, A. (2000): Logik (4th ed.). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter. (German)
- Ingarden, R. (1964/65): Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, vols. I–II. Tübingen: Niemeyer. (German)
See also:
- Mode of being
- Real being (German)
- Intentional being
- Truth