Bobby Quine's point regarding "existence exists" still goes unanswered. The point is that the statement itself is a tautology, not deserving of the status of some fundamental metaphysical truth. All it tells us is that what exists, exists (as Peikoff will tell you, it's a rendition of Parmenides' "what is, is"). It doesn't tell us anything about whether there is anything that actually exists. If what the phrase is meant to convey is "something exists (of which I am aware)" then it would qualify as an axiom in the Objectivist sense -- but it would not then be equivalent to "existence exists." David Kelley, a competent Objectivist philosopher, never used the phrase "existence exists" in his book The Evidence of the Senses, but instead talked of such things as "the primacy of existence" as central to his direct perceptual realism. Kelley knows very well that use of the phrase "existence exists" is not going to get him anywhere or prove a thing. Those Objectivists who do continue to spout the phrase as if it were some profound metaphysical truth, to try to prove some kind of philosophical point, will be laughed out of serious philosophical debate, and rightfully so.
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