In The Monist, special issue on Coming Into Being and Passing Away (ed. David Hershenov), Volume 89, Number 3 (July 2006), pages 294-300.
If something is in the process of coming into existence, it does not yet exist; so how can it be referred to? In this paper, several cases of coming into existence are examined, focussing on the temporal relationship between the process by which an object comes into existence and the time at which it first exists. This relates the problem of coming into existence to an array of modal concepts underlying the application of the imperfective aspect to telic verbs; and also to the well-known Vendler categories of state, activity, accomplishment and achievement. It emerges that the problem of when an object first exists is separate from that of what it is for it to be in the process of coming into existence. An object may first exist at the beginning, middle, or end of the process by which it comes into existence, depending on the identity criteria for the type of object involved.