Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Fiction and Fictionalism

  • John Gardner on Fiction and Philosophy

    Top o' the Stack. I spent an intense and enjoyable five hours with Steven Nemes on Saturday. He's had it with philosophy and theology and is in process of reinventing himself as a novelist.  So this one's for him.

  • A Cure for Infatuation?

    One of the very best is marriage.  Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.* But while infatuation lasts, it…

  • Identity and Quasi-Epistemic Contingency

    The Opponent sends the following puzzle to vex us: Story: there was someone called 'a', and there was someone called 'b'. This is all we have of the story. Let the predicate F be 'The story is consistent with anot being identical with ___'. Then clearly Fa is false, and Fb is true.  This is…

  • God as Biblical Character and as Divine Reality

    When Thomas Aquinas and Baruch Spinoza write about the God of the Old Testament, they write about numerically the same Biblical character using the same Latin word, Deus.  They write about this character, refer to it, and indeed succeed in referring to it.  But Aquinas and Spinoza do not believe in the same divine reality.…

  • What Problem Does Literary Fiction Pose?

    More than one.  Here is one.  And as old Chisholm used to say, you are not philosophizing unless you have a puzzle.  So try on this aporetic triad for size: 1. Purely fictional objects do not exist. 2. There are true  sentences about purely fictional objects, e.g., 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' and 'Sherlock Holmes…

  • Pre-Print: Peter van Inwagen, Existence: Essays in Ontology

    The following review article is scheduled to appear later this year in Studia Neoscholastica.  The editor grants me permission to reproduce it here should anyone have comments that might lead to its improvement. REVIEW ARTICLE William F. Vallicella  Peter van Inwagen, Existence: Essays in Ontology, Cambridge University Press, 2014, viii + 261 pp. This volume…

  • 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 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…

  • Another Round on Fictional Characters as Abstract Objects

    London Ed recommended to me Patrick Hamilton's 1941 booze novel, Hangover Square.  It gets off to a slow start, but quickly picks up speed and now has me in its grip.  I'm on p. 60.  The main character is one George Harvey Bone. Ed gives this argument in an earlier thread: (*) Bone, who is…

  • 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…

  • A Paraphrastic Approach to Fictional Sentences

    Here is a dyad for your delectation: 1. There are no purely fictional characters. 2. There are some purely fictional characters, e.g., Sherlock Holmes. (1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist.  But (2) also seems to be true.  And yet they cannot both…

  • 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,…