Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Existence

  • Arguing with Brightly over Ficta

    Earlier I wrote that the central problem in the philosophy of fiction is to find a solution to the following aporetic dyad: 1. There are no purely fictional items. 2. There are some purely fictional items. The problem is that while the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true, there is reason to think…

  • A Cartesian Argument Against Meinong

    The following is excerpted from my "Does Existence Itself Exist? Transcendental Nihilism Meets the Paradigm Theory" in The Philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov: A Collegial Evaluation, ed. Larry Lee Blackman, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, pp. 57-73, excerpt pp. 67-68. If anything can count as an established result in philosophy, it is the soundness of Descartes'…

  • The Existent Round Square

    One of Russell's objections to Meinong was that the denizens of Aussersein, i.e., beingless objects, are apt to infringe the Law of Non-Contradiction.  Suppose a Meinongian subscribes to the following principle: Unrestricted Satisfaction (US):  Every definite description is such that some object  satisfies it.  For any definite description we can concoct, there is a corresponding…

  • The Grand Central Conundrum in the Philosophy of Fiction

    As I see it, the central problem in the philosophy of fiction is to find a solution to the following aporetic dyad: 1. There are no purely fictional items. 2. There are some purely fictional items. The problem is that while the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true, there is reason to think…

  • London Paraphrastics Questioned

    To block the inference from 1. Frodo is a hobbit to 2. There are hobbits we can invoke story operators and substitute for (1) 1*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a hobbit. From (1*) one cannot validly infer (2).  So far, so good.  But what about the true 3. Frodo is a purely fictional…

  • London Ed on Peter van Inwagen on Fiction

    Comments by BV in blue. Inwagen gives persuasive arguments that there is only one sort of existential quantifier, that we cannot quantify over ‘things’ that are in some sense ‘beyond being’, and that ‘exists’ means the same as ‘is’ or ‘has being’. No review of his work would be complete without a careful discussion of…

  • Do Purely Fictional Items Exist? On Van Inwagen’s Theory of Ficta

    A character in a novel is an example of a purely fictional item provided that the character is wholly 'made up' by the novelist.  Paul Morphy, for example, is a character in Francis Parkinson Keyes' historical novel, The Chess Players but he is also a real-life 19th century New Orleans chess prodigy.  So Paul Morphy,…

  • Thinking About Frodo

    Let me attack yesterday's puzzle from a different angle.  The puzzle in one sentence:  we think about things that do not exist; but how is this possible given that they do not exist? Here is the problem set forth as an aporetic hexad: 1. When I think about Frodo, as I am doing right now,…

  • London Ed on Reference to What is Not

    Two weeks in Greece passed both quickly and slowly.  No access to internet or phone, much walking (on a lonely hillside I found a deserted monastery built on the ruins of a 6th century pagan temple) and much thinking.  In particular, thinking about the 'Meinongian' thesis that there are objects that do not exist, and…

  • Divine Simplicity, the Formal Distinction, and the Real Distinction

    If I understand Duns Scotus on the divine simplicity, his view in one sentence is that the divine attributes are really identical in God but formally distinct.  (Cf. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God, Ashgate 2005, p. 111)  I can understand this if I can understand the formal distinction (distinctio formalis)  and how it differs…

  • Book Notice: Elmar J. Kremer, Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller’s Approach to God

    I recall a remark by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Philosophische Lehrjahre to the effect that the harvest years of a scholar come late.  That  was certainly true in the case of the Australian philosopher Barry Miller (1923-2006).   His  philosophical career culminated in a burst of productivity.  In roughly the last decade of his long life…

  • What Exists Exists

    Reflecting on the seeming tautology, 'What exists exists,' Jacques Maritain writes, This is no tautology, it implies an entire metaphysics.  What is posited outside its causes exercises an activity, an energy which is existence itself.  To exist is to maintain oneself and to be maintained outside nothingness; esse is an act, a perfection, indeed the…

  • The Stromboli Puzzle Revisited

    Here is a little puzzle I call the Stromboli Puzzle.  An earlier post on this topic was defective.  So I return to the topic.  The puzzle  brings out some of the issues surrounding existence.  Consider the following argument. Stromboli exists.Stromboli is an island volcano.ErgoAn island volcano exists. This is a sound argument: the premises are…

  • On Conceiving that God does not Exist

    In a recent post you write: The Humean reasoning in defense of (3) rests on the assumption that conceivability entails possibility.  To turn aside this reasoning one must reject this assumption.  One could then maintain that the conceivability by us of the nonexistence of God is consistent with the necessity of God's existence. I’m not…

  • A Being-Knowledge Antilogism

    An antilogism is an inconsistent triad: a set of three propositions that cannot all be true.  The most interesting antilogisms are those in which the constitutent propositions are each of them plausible.  If they are not merely plausible but self-evident or undeniable, then we are in the presence of an aporia in the strict sense.  (From…