I tend to use the noun 'being' as a count noun: You and I are both beings; maybe the number seven is also a being (although of a different kind from you or me). I'll therefore use the words 'existence' or 'reality' for what you seem to refer to by 'being' in your question. When it asks questions about existence or reality, modern-day philosophy -- including analytic philosophy -- ranges as broadly as you like. Philosophy doesn't confine itself to the world described by natural science. Often philosophy asks about the existence or reality of non-natural beings such as abstract objects (maybe numbers, properties, propositions) or concrete, non-natural beings (maybe immaterial minds or souls, maybe God). It's true that analytic philosophers tend to respect natural science, but they shouldn't (and largely don't) think that all legitimate questions are questions for natural science. Furthermore, contemporary philosophy -- perhaps especially analytic philosophy -- asks about ways that reality could have been but isn't: for example, in analyzing counterfactual conditionals, identity, cause and effect, the concept of knowledge, the concept of merit or desert, and countless other things too. I think contemporary analytic philosophy is much less narrowly scientistic (i.e., uncritically science-worshiping) than you may have been led to believe. For just two of many examples of analytic philosophy venturing beyond the realm of natural science, see these entries in the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (an online resource I keep recommending!):

SEP, "Abstract Objects"
SEP, "Transworld Identity"

Sure. Even if existence is not a predicate, it's at least arguable that necessary existence is. (As Norman Malcolm pointed out years ago, there really are two versions of the argument, and the second one deals with necessary existence.)

We doubt that existence is a predicate because, roughly, saying that something exists tells us nothing about what it's like. Not so for necessary existence. Not just anything could exist necessarily. The computer I'm typing on is the wrong sort of thing to be a candidate for necessarily existing thing. Assuming that some things are of the right sort to exist necessarily, necessary existence would be a predicate.

Whether this is a defense of the argument all things considered is another matter. But I think the point made here is fair as far as it goes. A being that merely happened to exist wouldn't be a being than which none greater can be conceived.

Why not? Both vegetables and us having being, albeit rather different.

I recall a show many years ago which had a very human plant in it, but the trouble with it for our purposes here is that really it was a human being dressed up as a plant, as far as I could see from its behaviour, and so hardly expressive of a very different life form.

Great question. I don't have an answer. But some thoughts depend on how you frame things. If by "causation" you have a certain model in mind (e.g. where something is transferred from cause to effect) then it does seem contradictory to say that 'something comes from nothing' -- if that is taken to mean 'nothing causes something to come into being' -- for that seems to require both that something be transferred from cause to effect (by the word 'causes') yet that there be nothing to be transferred (since 'nothing' is said to be THE cause) .... But who is to say that 'causation' should be understood on that model? And even that model would not rule out the metaphysical possibility of something coming from nothing, if what that means is 'something comes into existence uncaused' -- there does not seem to be a contradiction, or at least not an obvious one, in the latter, since no 'causation' is being implied .....

hope that's a useful start!

ap

Hm, it's not quite clear where this question is coming from -- if by 'property' you mean something like 'attribute' or 'feature', the kind of thing that can be possessed by objects or substances, and if you mean by 'metaphysical concept' the kind of thing studied by people who say they are doing metaphysics, then yes! But that seems to simple an answer, as if you have some underlying issue that's motivating the question -- but I can't quite figure out what it is? What turns on answering this question yes or no?

ap

As your formulations nicely bring out, the problem here arises from the combination of two phenomena: that there is something rather than nothing, and that our mind finds it more natural (less surprising, less boggling, more sense-making) that there should be nothing rather than anything.

Our disposition to find certain things disturbing is a feature of the mind we have, which developed through evolution and education. It's not hard to tell a story about why our mind should have developed this way: we do best concentrating our explanatory efforts on events and changes rather than where nothing it happening. So we reason with a maxim like "nothing happens without a reason" (meaning: whenever something happens, then there is a reason for it). But this useful maxim, deeply entrenched in even our more unreflective behavior, may not serve us best in all contexts. It may make us overlook that in some cases a non-event needs explanation (Sherlock Holmes' famous case of the dog that did not bark). And it may leave us stunned before the question of why there is something rather than nothing at all, because any reason we can think of (e.g., a creator god) would leave us equally at a loss to explain why he/it should exist rather than not exist. (This is how Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, expresses this mind-boggling experience: "Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss. Eternity itself, in all its terrible sublimity ... is far from making the same overwhelming impression on the mind; for it only measures the duration of things, it does not support them. We cannot put aside, and yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme amongst all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? ' All support here fails us....")

As Kant also recognized, the only way to banish our anxiety is to recognize the contribution our mind makes to our sense of puzzlement, to recognize that we have no good reason for our disposition to find nothingness natural ("it makes sense to me") and somethingness mind-boggling or even terrifying. One could then add that, once we make the effort to suppress this disposition, then somethingness perhaps even becomes the less surprising outcome. There are countless ways for there to be something, after all, and only one way for there to be nothing -- so would it not be mind-bogglingly surprising, if there had been nothing at all? (Unsurprisingly, surprise occurs only if there is something rather than nothing, of course.)

As for philosophers having dealt with this question, I would also mention Hegel (the Science of Logic), Heidegger (Being and Time), and Nozick (Philosophical Explanations) -- plus see the entry "Nothingness" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Perhaps in the Western tradition the most useful approach to your sense of puzzlement is the kind of philosophy as therapy that Wittgenstein developed in his later work, most strikingly perhaps in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. And then there is also a great deal of Eastern religion and philosophy to explore, though you would need a better guide for that literature and teaching than I could be.