While looking around some websites concerning ontology, I came upon an interesting question, is existence a quality, or property? Of course their are different positions on this topic, and I found it hard to take one. Let me just define property as a
"quality, attribute, or distinctive feature of anything, esp a characteristic attribute such as the density or strength of a material."
I think one of the reasons this question is so difficult to answer is because it is vague. We must decide if their is something that does not exist, and if this object can be charecterized as a thing. Abstract concepts do not exist in reality, neither does many human inventions such as language. A flower is not truly a flower, a bird is not truly a bird, their is not ACTUAL , objective names for any o these things, we merely give them names. We must decide if these concepts have other traits and qualities, and existence is just one of many. So how should we study this paradoxical question? I will attempt to use logic to answer the question.

Let's take an animal that does not exist in reality that a human decides to invent as a concept, or drawing. Now, this animal obviously does not exist, yet has the potential to exist through evolution by natural selection. This animal could have qualities that exist in reality, but the actual animal does not exist. let's look at another example before moving in-depth into this one.

Before you were born, the chance of you existing was innumerably tiny, one out of millions. The chance of your genetic material being different was huge. Yet you do exist, and millions of other genetically different people lost out on the chance to exist. These people, who have different genetic material then you, but do not exist. From this example, it seems that existence is a property, as other possible people do not exist yet have qualities and properties. But Ayn Rand makes a compelling argument that existence is merely an axiom which is a base for knowledge...

Although I am not sure if Ayn Rand thought existence was a property or not, but she did think that existence was a base for knowledge and a self-evident truth. After all, their is an infinite number of things that do not exist, and since these things do they actually have these traits, these properties? Are these properties not just throughts of a human mind and not objective?

Quality or not, existence is a self-evident truth according to Rand, meaning that existence exists. But why? I will attempt to answer that in my next post.