Michael Hardy misquotes me regarding "existence exists." I did not say that those who use it would be laughed out of respectable discussion. I did say that they would be laughed out of discussion if they use it to try to prove some philosophical point. And the reason for this is that, indeed, the statement is a contentless, uninformative, uninteresting tautology from which nothing can be derived. If what Rand "really" meant to express by the phrase is "the primacy of existence," then why didn't she just defend the primacy of existence without trying to defend it via a useless tautology? By "tautology," I mean a term that need not be applied merely within the context of "mathematical, formal, or symbolic" logic: it can be meant to apply to any statement that involves needless repetition. I don't see the point in trying to insulate Rand's "axiom" from the charge of tautology by insisting that we confine the use of the term "tautology" only to the realm of "mathematical, formal, or symbolic" logic. Insisting this is not going to erase the fact that Rand employed a useless phrase that cannot be used to prove anything of philosophical importance. The primacy of existence can be defended without superfluous phrases like "existence exists." And need I point out that the use of this phrase in the Objectivist literature is not some philosophically innocuous extra verbiage thrown in with the useful stuff? Objectivists -- particularly those of the Peikoffian stripe -- have used the phrase in the attempt to prove such things as the metaphysical impossibility of God and the falsity of idealism. However the primacy of existence might be defended, "this" is not the way to go about it.
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