What can we learn about the world from engaging with fictional time-series--stories involving time travellers, recurring and rewinding time, and foreknowledge of the future? Do they show us radical alternative possibilities concerning the nature of time, or do they show that even the impossible can be represented in fiction? Neither, so this book argues. Defending the view that a fiction represents a single possible world, the authors show how apparent representations of radically different time-series can be explained in (...) terms of how worlds are represented without there being any fictional world which has such a time-series. In this way, the book uses the complexities of fictional time to get to the core of the relation between truth in fiction and possibility. It provides a logic and metaphysics to deal with the fact that fictions can leave certain features of their fictional worlds indefinite, and draws comparisons and connections between fictional and scientific representations and hypotheses. (shrink)

In previous research, cultural proximity has been operationalized by ‘hard facts’ such as geographical distance, the exchange of goods or persons and the similarity of political systems. This article will try to complement current work in the field by suggesting a new operationalization derived from Hofstede's cultural dimensions. A survey was conducted in eight countries with a student sample to find out if international audiences which resemble each other in terms of Hofstede's cultural dimensions have similar attitudes towards U.S. prime-time (...) fictional programming. The results show that Hofstede's four cultural dimensions significantly differentiate between the U.S.A., Asian and European countries in a student population. However, operationalizations based on geographical distance allow a better differentiation between nation-states in terms of how they evaluate U.S. fiction. It will be discussed whether cultural dimensions in general are able to measure cultural proximity. (shrink)

Why have theorists approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect? Mark Currie argues that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future are vital for an understanding of narrative and its effects in the world. In a series of arguments and readings, he offers an account of narrative as both anticipation and retrospection, linking fictional time experiments (in Ali Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Graham Swift) to exhilarating philosophical themes about presence and futurity. This is an argument (...) that shows that narrative lies at the heart of modern experiences of time, structuring the present, whether personal or collective, as the object of a future memory as much as it records the past. (shrink)

Some fictions seem to involve branching time, where one time series ‘splits’ into two or two time series ‘fuse’ into one. We provide a new framework for thinking about these fictional representations: not as representations of branching time series but rather as branching representations of linear time series. We explain how branching at the level of the representation creates a false impression that the story describes a branching of the time series in the fictional world itself. This involves explaining away (...) the illusion of various causal connections which may at first appear essential to understanding the story as a unified whole. This provides a more accurate account of the relationship between the representation and what is represented, which in turn reveals the extent to which it is legitimate to draw conclusions about actual time from fictional representations. (shrink)

A timely volume that uses science fiction as a springboard to meaningful philosophical discussions, especially at points of contact between science fiction and new scientific developments. Raises questions and examines timely themes concerning the nature of the mind, time travel, artificial intelligence, neural enhancement, free will, the nature of persons, transhumanism, virtual reality, and neuroethics Draws on a broad range of books, films and television series, including _The Matrix, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Frankenstein, Brave New World, The Time (...) Machine,_ and _Back to the Future_ Considers the classic philosophical puzzles that appeal to the general reader, while also exploring new topics of interest to the more seasoned academic. (shrink)

The first section of this article focuses on the treatment of “time travel” in science-fiction literature and film as presented in the secondary literature in that field. The first anthology I will consider has a metaphysical focus, including (a) relating the time travel of science fiction to the banal time travel of all living beings, as we move inexorably toward the future; and (b) arguing for the filmstrip as the ultimate metaphor for time. The second anthology I will (...) consider has a more political focus, arguing that the “special effects” form of science-fiction films, rather than the visual or narrative content of science-fiction-films, is truly imaginative and futural. The second section of this article ties together a variety of concepts and insights between time-travel cinema and Deleuze’s Cinema 1, suggesting (among other things) that (c) time-traveling characters in cinema function as a redoubled phenomenon of the “mobile sections” of Bergsonian duration (in reference to Henri Bergson), and (d) time-travel cinema vividly illustrates the imagistic nature of the entire world. (shrink)

Introduction 11 PART I: THE HALLE YEARS Chapter One: The Rehabilitation of the Imagination in Husserl’s Early Thought. 17 §1. Brentano’s Rehabilitation of Intentionality and the Problem of Imagination. §2. Husserl and the Breakthrough of Phenomenology. §2.1 The Meaning-Bestowing Act as ‘the Peg from which Everything hangs.’ §2.2 Consciousness is not a Container. §2.3 ‘A Difference that cannot be Phenomenologically Reduced.’ §3. Imagination as an Authentic, Intuitive Intentionality. PART II: THE GÖTTINGEN YEARS Chapter Two: Irreconcilable Differences: Imagination and Image Consciousness. (...) 71 §1. Separations, Convergences, and Goodbyes §2. A nothing in the midst of things that sees me. §3. Wrestling with the angel of Imagination. §4. Images of Productive Phantasy. Chapter Three: The Garden of the Forking Paths: On Time Consciousness. 107 §1. Picking up an Ancient Cross. §2. Continuum of Continua. §3. In Search of Time Lost. Chapter Four: Absence and the Absolute: The Revisions of Phantasy and Time-Consciousness. 143 Recapitulation: Cutting loose the baggage of the ‘Content for an Apprehension and Apprehension’ Schema. §1. The Concept of an Absolute Consciousness and the Embedment of Contents. §2. Transcendental Phenomenology and the Opening Up of a Closed Field. §3. The Breakthrough on the Contents of Consciousness. §3.1. ‘Consciousness through and through’ §3.2. Ambiguities of Immanence. §4. Primary and Secondary Memory revisited. §5. The New Account of Internal Time Consciousness. Chapter Five: The Breakthrough of the Life of Phantasy: Recollection and Pure Phantasy. 187 §1. Introducing the Pure Ego. §2. The Pending Problem of Belief in Presentifications. §3. Recollection and Internal Time Consciousness. §3.1. The Characterization of Recollection as Consciousness ‘Once Again’ following the Revision of the Schema. §3.2. Recollection as a Modified Appearance and a Directedness toward the Past Object. §3.3. Recollection as the Reproductive Modification of the Internal Consciousness of a Past Act. §4. The Differentiation of Recollection and Pure Phantasy on the basis of Internal Time-Consciousness. PART III: THE FREIBURG YEARS AND BEYOND Chapter Six: The Subject in Image: Husserl’s Revisiting of Image-Consciousness. 239 §1. Introducing the Concept of Perceptual Phantasy. §2. The Subject in Image. §3. Is There Temporality in Image?. §4. Revisiting the Theory of Image-consciousness as Depiction. §5. Pictoriality and Phantasy Temporality. Chapter Seven: ‘Myth that is Truest Memory:’ Phantasy and the Literary Work of Art. 303 §1. Theater and Drama. §2. Is the Literary Work of Art Itself Imaginary? §3. The Literary Work as an Idea with a Temporality. §4. Phantasy and the Consciousness of Possibility. Parting Words on Poetry and Philosophy. Bibliography: 361. (shrink)

Dr. Max Felix Silva, dean of the Graduate School of Philosophy and the senior students’ professor of critical theory, was still engrossed in discursively analyzing the transcripts of the peace negotiations between the government panel and the representatives of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. He was trying to show his students the practical use of the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ doctrine that in order to attain optimum results in a dialogue the participants should only use statements and actuations (...) that are truthful, sincere and appropriate all of the time. “Okay, class. You can be truthful but insincere, or you can be truthful and sincere but in an inappropriate way, or you can be appropriate and sincere but not truthful. The point of Habermas is simple: failing in just one of these triple criteria can already jeopardize the outcome of any consensus building. Ako ba ay nasusundan n’yo pa?”. (shrink)

This article explores the therapeutic potential of narrative fiction during a global health crisis. We focus on The Decameron Project, a collection of short fiction by writers from around the world, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine. The Decameron Project references the narrative framework established by Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-14th century, when the Black Death devastated Europe. Drawing on aspects of psychoanalytic theory and principles of bibliotherapy employed since the Middle Ages, we argue that The Decameron (...) Project offers strategies to simultaneously confront and contain the anxious mind. Storytelling, according to both Boccaccio and to the editors of The Decameron Project, is not merely a source of distraction but a means of survival. (shrink)

The ethics of human enhancement has been a hotly debated topic in the last 15 years. In this debate, some advocate examining science fiction stories to elucidate the ethical issues regarding the current phenomenon of human enhancement. Stories from science fiction seem well suited to analyze biomedical advances, providing some possible case studies. Of particular interest is the work of screenwriter Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1m0ne, In Time, and Good Kill), which often focuses on ethical questions raised by the (...) use of new technologies. Examining the movie In Time (2011), the aim of this paper is to show how science fiction can contribute to the ethical debate of human enhancement. In Time provides an interesting case study to explore what could be some of the consequences of radical life-extension technologies. In this paper, we will show how arguments regarding radical life-extension portrayed in this particular movie differ from what is found in the scientific literature. We will see how In Time gives flesh to arguments defending or rejecting radical life-extension. It articulates feelings of unease, alienation and boredom associated with this possibility. Finally, this article will conclude that science fiction movies in general, and In Time in particular, are a valuable resource for a broad and comprehensive debate about our coming future. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] have been many studies of the nature of fictional characters: whether and what sense, they are real, and how, if not real, there can be truths apparently about them. But, as the authors of this lively, original and provocative essay point out, the ontology of fiction is by no means exhausted by the (...) characters of fiction, and to focus mono-maniacally on characters misses some fascinating problems in the philosophy of fiction, and perhaps risks distorting one’s view of it. And one very large part of fictional ontology, without which narrative fiction would simply not exist, is time, and this is, as I think the authors can justifiably claim, the first monograph-length analytic philosophical treatment of the topic. The OUP website puts... (shrink)

Critical thought on immersive theatres is gathering in pace with many arguments centred on explorations of audience/performer interaction and the unique relationship these theatres create. Within this paper I look beyond these debates in order to consider the implications of immersive theatres within contemporary culture, with the aim of furthering the ways in which immersive theatres are presently being framed and discussed. Theatre and science fiction have shared a somewhat limited relationship compared to their burgeoning usage within other forms (...) of entertainment. This paper focuses on how the conceits of science fiction are being staged within this theatrical setting. Primary focus is given to Punchdrunk’s… and darkness descended and The Crash of the Elysium. This is considered alongside The Republic of the Imagination’s Cerebellium, an original narrative created for the performance which has been subsequently developed over a three-year period to date. This discussion is presented and framed through my personal experience as both a performer in Cerebellium and as audience member. The particular use of dystopian narratives and alternate worlds is given consideration, with reflection on the way these works destabilize and call into question the audience’s sense of self either through their ability to survive or understand their sense of self. By making evident the spectrum of practice, I endeavour to delve further into identifying and de-mystifying immersive theatres and their differences to conventional theatre. (shrink)

As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person's emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an (...) elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them. (shrink)

In some stories, time travellers cannot change the past. It is widely accepted that this is metaphysically possible. In some stories, time travellers can change the past. Many philosophers have explained how that, too, is metaphysically possible. This paper considers narratives where sometimes the past can change and sometimes it cannot, arguing that this is also something that is possible. Further, I argue that we can make sense of stories where some events appear to be ‘fixed points in time’.

Resumen: Mediante un ejercicio hermenéutico se sostiene que la identidad personal supera la aporía del tiempo al construirse como relato de ficción. Primero, se plantea que el relato de ficción se inscribe en el círculo de la mimesis; segundo, que la imaginación es la facultad que crea el sentido de la identidad personal como relato de ficción; tercero, que es la imaginación la que establece la relación entre relato de ficción, innovación semántica e identidad personal; y cuarto, que la identidad (...) personal se crea a sí misma por medio de la generación sentido gracias al relato de ficción. Abstract: Through a hermeneutical approach, this paper states that personal identity overcomes the aporetic of time when built as a fictional narrative. First, it proposes that the fictional narrative is inscribed in the mimesis circle. Secondly, that imagination is the faculty that creates the meaning of personal identity as fictional narrative. Thirdly, that it is the imagination that establishes the relation among fictional narrative, semantic innovation, and personal identity. Fourthly, that personal identity as fictional narrative stresses the importance of the narrative, which creates itself as a generator of meanings. (shrink)

A personal report on a recent Web conference hosted by Cappadocia University, Turkey on the cultural impacts of pandemics. January 13-15, 2021.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction by Mark PayneAihua ChenFlowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction, by Mark Payne; 192 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction contributes significantly to the nascent scholarship on the ever-increasing corpus of postapocalyptic fiction by reading this genre philosophically and interrogating how it imagines new forms of life beyond the confines of a (...) particular kind of world and outside the polis walls. Payne's claim is that postapocalyptic fiction is "political theory in fiction form" and "shows what it would be like to live that life" (p. 2). Moreover, he posits that postapocalyptic fiction "imagines forms of human freedom, sociality, and capability outside the discourse of normative theory" (pp. 2–3). This monograph, framed by the great thinkers such as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and many others, provides a cogent and incisive analysis of the themes of occupation, ontology, and the anthropological horizon in postapocalyptic fiction. It offers a comprehensive study of the genre, ranging in the context of philosophical and political ideas from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. The readings include a well-developed introduction, three analytical chapters, and a conclusion.In his extensive introduction, Payne provides a rich background for his study of postapocalyptic fiction and perspicuously outlines his theoretical framework and research scope. Payne first traces the literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction to the biblical tale of Noah, and Hesiod's Works and Days. He offers a helpful delineation of the salient differences between apocalyptic fiction and postapocalyptic fiction, and thus narrows his research scope to postapocalyptic fictions that commit themselves to "staging human beings living on after the catastrophe, and to showing why catastrophe is necessary for the new forms of human sociality they envision" (p. 18), which accounts for his omission of some famous postapocalyptic novels, such as Will Self's The Book of Dave and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.After acknowledging his indebtedness to earlier research, Payne argues that although some critical readings of postapocalyptic fiction "have rightly identified its commitment to starting over, they have generally mischaracterized it by beginning at the macrosocial level, with the social contract and other large-scale forms of social organization, rather than the single human being and their body." He further suggests that "postapocalyptic fiction advances a strand of political thought that is as ancient as Aristotle's student Dicaearchus, who argued, against his teacher, that the polis is not the best form of life for the realization of human potential" (p. 21).Therefore, his research addresses this gap by focusing on individualism, small-scale sociality, and forms of freedom and regeneration outside the polis wall. Payne points out that "the form of freedom staged in postapocalyptic fiction is [End Page 499] marronage" (p. 26). Especially noteworthy is that Payne gives a detailed explication of the theory of marronage, the relationship between occupation and mentation to which he frequently refers in subsequent chapters to expound how survivors after the apocalyptic event can adapt themselves to the altered world and have new forms of mental life through their new occupations.The first chapter, "The Apocalyptic Cosmos," examines how cosmic forces transform human beings' physical existence and forms of life in the works of Hesiod, Shelley, and Olaf Stapledon, and how these writers engage with the immediacy of relationship between occupation and mentation. Payne first engages in illuminating exploration of how Shelley draws on Works and Days for her vision of postapocalyptic fiction. He argues that The Last Man looks to Works and Days "for its vision of human victimization at the hands of a whimsical cosmos" (p. 37). For Shelley, primitive agriculture is the ideal form of life, in which "the relationship between occupation and mentation is the most satisfying to human beings because it affords them the idea that personal, small-scale, local divinities care about human beings in the same way that human beings care for them" (p. 44). In the latter part of the chapter, Payne illustrates how Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker reveal... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction by Mark PayneAihua ChenFlowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction, by Mark Payne; 192 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction contributes significantly to the nascent scholarship on the ever-increasing corpus of postapocalyptic fiction by reading this genre philosophically and interrogating how it imagines new forms of life beyond the confines of a (...) particular kind of world and outside the polis walls. Payne's claim is that postapocalyptic fiction is "political theory in fiction form" and "shows what it would be like to live that life" (p. 2). Moreover, he posits that postapocalyptic fiction "imagines forms of human freedom, sociality, and capability outside the discourse of normative theory" (pp. 2–3). This monograph, framed by the great thinkers such as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and many others, provides a cogent and incisive analysis of the themes of occupation, ontology, and the anthropological horizon in postapocalyptic fiction. It offers a comprehensive study of the genre, ranging in the context of philosophical and political ideas from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. The readings include a well-developed introduction, three analytical chapters, and a conclusion.In his extensive introduction, Payne provides a rich background for his study of postapocalyptic fiction and perspicuously outlines his theoretical framework and research scope. Payne first traces the literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction to the biblical tale of Noah, and Hesiod's Works and Days. He offers a helpful delineation of the salient differences between apocalyptic fiction and postapocalyptic fiction, and thus narrows his research scope to postapocalyptic fictions that commit themselves to "staging human beings living on after the catastrophe, and to showing why catastrophe is necessary for the new forms of human sociality they envision" (p. 18), which accounts for his omission of some famous postapocalyptic novels, such as Will Self's The Book of Dave and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.After acknowledging his indebtedness to earlier research, Payne argues that although some critical readings of postapocalyptic fiction "have rightly identified its commitment to starting over, they have generally mischaracterized it by beginning at the macrosocial level, with the social contract and other large-scale forms of social organization, rather than the single human being and their body." He further suggests that "postapocalyptic fiction advances a strand of political thought that is as ancient as Aristotle's student Dicaearchus, who argued, against his teacher, that the polis is not the best form of life for the realization of human potential" (p. 21).Therefore, his research addresses this gap by focusing on individualism, small-scale sociality, and forms of freedom and regeneration outside the polis wall. Payne points out that "the form of freedom staged in postapocalyptic fiction is [End Page 499] marronage" (p. 26). Especially noteworthy is that Payne gives a detailed explication of the theory of marronage, the relationship between occupation and mentation to which he frequently refers in subsequent chapters to expound how survivors after the apocalyptic event can adapt themselves to the altered world and have new forms of mental life through their new occupations.The first chapter, "The Apocalyptic Cosmos," examines how cosmic forces transform human beings' physical existence and forms of life in the works of Hesiod, Shelley, and Olaf Stapledon, and how these writers engage with the immediacy of relationship between occupation and mentation. Payne first engages in illuminating exploration of how Shelley draws on Works and Days for her vision of postapocalyptic fiction. He argues that The Last Man looks to Works and Days "for its vision of human victimization at the hands of a whimsical cosmos" (p. 37). For Shelley, primitive agriculture is the ideal form of life, in which "the relationship between occupation and mentation is the most satisfying to human beings because it affords them the idea that personal, small-scale, local divinities care about human beings in the same way that human beings care for them" (p. 44). In the latter part of the chapter, Payne illustrates how Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker reveal... (shrink)

The theme of The Planetary Clock is the representation of time in postmodern culture and the way temporality as a global phenomenon manifests itself differently across an antipodean axis. To trace postmodernism in an expansive spatial and temporal arc, from its formal experimentation in the 1960s to environmental concerns in the twenty-first century, is to describe a richer and more complex version of this cultural phenomenon. Exploring different scales of time from a Southern Hemisphere perspective, with a special emphasis on (...) issues of Indigeneity and the Anthropocene, The Planetary Clock offers a wide-ranging, revisionist account of postmodernism, reinterpreting literature, film, music, and visual art of the post-1960 period within a planetary framework. By bringing the culture of Australia and New Zealand into dialogue with other Western narratives, it suggests how an antipodean impulse, involving the transposition of the world into different spatial and temporal dimensions, has long been an integral (if generally occluded) aspect of postmodernism. Taking its title from a Florentine clock designed in 1510 to measure worldly time alongside the rotation of the planets, The Planetary Clock ranges across well-known American postmodernists (John Barth, Toni Morrison) to more recent science fiction writers (Octavia Butler, Richard Powers), while bringing the US tradition into juxtaposition with both its English (Philip Larkin, Ian McEwan) and Australian (Les Murray, Alexis Wright) counterparts. By aligning cultural postmodernism with music (Messiaen, Ligeti, Birtwistle), the visual arts (Hockney, Blackman, Fiona Hall), and cinema (Rohmer, Haneke, Tarantino), this volume enlarges our understanding of global postmodernism for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In The Distant Relation Eoin Thomson presents innovative readings of canonical philosophic and literary texts, focusing on the distance that mediates the relation between word and thing, past and present, I and you. Through a novel convergence, itself arising from a field of philosophic and literary experimentation, he challenges previous traditions while demonstrating that his strategy is appropriate to the texts considered. The Distant Relation breaks down the artificial division between philosophy and literature by weaving contemporary philosophic arguments through close (...) readings of Carpentier, Rulfo, Paz, and Garcia Marquez. Thomson draws the reader into the largely uninhabited space between philosophy and literature, providing new critical strategies that allow text and reader to respond to the very distance they share. These strategies involve a reconceptualisation of distance that recognises the productive and affirmative nature of separation. The Distant Relation will attract anyone interested in the ongoing struggle to overcome conventional interpretations of language, time, and identity within the broader context of philosophical trends and Spanish American studies. Eoin S. Thomson is an independent scholar who has taught in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. (shrink)

The subject of this book is the relationship between the Soviet regime and the Soviet middleclass citizen.

The subject of this book is the relationship between the Soviet regime and the Soviet middleclass citizen.

Fictional names pose a difficult puzzle for semantics. We can truthfully maintain that Frodo is a hobbit, while at the same time admitting that Frodo does not exist. To reconcile this paradox I propose a way to formalize the interpretation of fiction as ‘prescriptions to imagine’ (Walton 1990) within an asymmetric semantic framework in the style of Kamp (1990). In my proposal, fictional statements are analyzed as dynamic updates on an imagination component of the interpreter’s mental state, while plain (...) assertions are updates on a belief component. Proper names – regular, empty, or fictional – are uniformly analyzed as presupposition triggers. The possibility of different attitude components referentially depending on each other is what ultimately allows us to account for the central paradox mentioned above. (shrink)

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language. Its central idea is familiar to anyone exposed to the ways of narrative fiction, namely the notion of a fictional teller. Starting with premises having to do with fictional names such as 'Holmes' or 'Emma', Stefano Predelli develops Radical Fictionalism, a theory that is subsequently applied to central themes in the analysis of fiction. Among other things, he discusses (...) the distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, the relationships between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, narrative time, unreliability, and closure. The final chapters extend Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse, as Predelli introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters. (shrink)

Are fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes real? What can fiction tell us about the nature of truth and reality? In this excellent introduction to the problem of fictionalism R. M. Sainsbury covers the following key topics: what is fiction? realism about fictional objects, including the arguments that fictional objects are real but non-existent; real but non-factual; real but non-concrete the relationship between fictional characters and non-actual worlds fictional entities as abstract artefacts fiction and intentionality and the (...) problem of irrealism fictionalism about possible worlds moral fictionalism. R. M. Sainsbury makes extensive use of examples from fiction, such as Sherlock Holmes, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and examines the work of philosophers who have made significant contributions to the topic, including Meinong, David Lewis, and Bas Van Fraassen. Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms, making _Fiction and Fictionalism_ ideal for those coming to the issue for the first time. (shrink)

In his discussion of our idea of time in the Treatise, Hume makes the perplexing claim that unchanging objects cannot be said to endure. While Hume is targeting the Newtonian conception of absolute time, it is not at all clear how his denial that unchanging objects are in time fits with this target. Moreover, Hume diagnoses our belief that unchanging objects endure as the product of a psychological fiction, but his account of this fiction is also riddled with (...) puzzling claims about our experience of unchanging objects. In this paper, we argue that Hume’s claims are a lot less baffling and indeed, much more sophisticated than they appear. We do so by considering his arguments as a response to Locke’s specific approach to the concept of absolute time. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of truth in interactive fiction. Interactive fiction allows the audience to make choices, resulting in many different possible fictions within each interactive fiction, unlike in literary fiction where there is just one. Adequately capturing this feature of interactive fiction requires us to address familiar issues regarding impossible fiction and the nature of time in fiction. Truth in interactive fiction thus requires a complex account to capture its multitude (...) of fictions. It is argued that a full account of truth in interactive fiction requires distinguishing two works for each interactive fiction, which contain distinct fictional truths. The actual work encompasses what is in fact represented as fictional (hence mistakes can be fictionally true in this work), whilst in the implied work, truth in fiction is governed by authorial intention, hence mistakes are not fictionally true. This dual account best captures our aesthetic evaluation of interactive fictions, for which we often need to distinguish how the work actually is from how it was intended to be. (shrink)

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw an apparent change in language in public discourses characterised by the rise of so-called “essentially oxymoronic concepts”, i.e., mainly oxymora and paradoxes. In earlier times, these rhetorical figures of speech were largely reserved for the domain of literature, the arts or mysticism. Today, however, many new technologies and other innovations are contributing to their rise also in the domains of science and of law. Particularly in law, their inherent contradictory quality of combining apparently (...) antagonistic suppositions challenges the traditional dualistic mode of reasoning and binary logic. As reflected in terms like fake news, alternative facts or conspiracy theories, these concepts are seen as a threat to the rule of law and legal certainty and have been described as harbingers of an age of disinformation or post-truth. The challenge posed by these apparently contradictory concepts requires a closer look at the premises that guide our legal thinking and a more integrated theory of the senses and their role in law, as captured by the terms “legal synaesthesia” and “legal semiotics”. It also calls for an inquiry into the mind’s functioning generally and how it processes information in the creative process of decision making, linking thoughts and actions as well as facts and fictions. Based on the qualification of “fake news” as an oxymoron, this article critically examines the deficiencies in a dichotomous distinction between fact and fiction exemplified by information about the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 in an attempt to clarify the principal issues for a global regulatory debate regarding “fake news”. (shrink)

Pulp Fiction is pulp and transcends pulp. As such, it is an authentic film. It is of its time, aware of the concrete reality of its historical context, teaming with cultural allusions. It is a self-conscious, postmodern pastiche, with a nonlinear narrative. But Pulp Fiction also transcends all of this. It celebrates morality, mercy, and forgiveness, and rewards authenticity of the deepest kind, requiring acknowledgment of our finite realities, our infinite nature, and God’s grace. Pulp Fiction is (...) postmodern, but it is also modern. By embodying this duality and challenging the viewer to engage with it themselves through the distinct attitudes of the main characters, Pulp Fiction is able to present an engaging, compelling, complex, and opinionated meditation on human life as a struggle for self-knowledge and authenticity. (shrink)

One of the basic insights of the book is that there is a notion of non-relational linguistic representation which can fruitfully be employed in a systematic approach to literary fiction. This notion allows us to develop an improved understanding of the ontological nature of fictional entities. A related insight is that the customary distinction between extra-fictional and intra-fictional contexts has only a secondary theoretical importance. This distinction plays a central role in nearly all contemporary theories of literary fiction. (...) There is a tendency among researchers to take it as obvious that the contrast between these two types of contexts is crucial for understanding the boundary that divides fiction from non-fiction. Seen from the perspective of non-relational representation, the key question is rather how representational networks come into being and how consumers of literary texts can, and do, engage with these networks. As a whole, the book provides, for the first time, a comprehensive artefactualist account of the nature of fictional entities. (shrink)

Alors que le temps présent paraît marqué par une incertitude forte, voire croissante, comment (re)trouver des prises sur ce qui est en devenir et qui pourrait composer le futur? Cette contribution propose de montrer que la science-fiction offre un matériau qui a aussi une pertinence et qui peut être travaillé pour être incorporé dans un processus de production de connaissance. Les textes de science-fiction peuvent en effet être pris à la fois comme un réservoir d’expériences de pensée et (...) comme des formes de problématisations (au sens de Michel Foucault). En s’appuyant sur un corpus de textes francophones et anglophones orientés vers un futur plus ou moins proche et généralement considérés comme porteurs de positions engagées (fiction spéculative, anticipation sociale, cyberpunk et postcyberpunk, biopunk, etc.), une première base de démonstration précisera d’abord l’appréhension réflexive qui peut être faite de la science-fiction au-delà de la forme culturelle et de son expression littéraire. Une seconde avancera ensuite une série de propositions méthodologiques pour saisir l’objet et pouvoir traduire cet imaginaire en prises expérimentales sur le futur. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 371-373 [Access article in PDF] Book Review French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire, by Colin Davis & Elizabeth Fallaize; 160pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, $24.95. Like the Mitterrand era itself, Davis and Fallaize's French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years is somewhat uneven. The election of François Mitterrand in (...) 1981 as the President of the Fifth Republic was a milestone in modern French history. After the conservative politics of the 1960s and 70s, the election of a socialist president and legislature seemed to offer the possibility of a new political and intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, the first two years of Mitterrand's presidency brought sweeping reforms. However, several scandals, continued economic problems and later "cohabitation" with a right-wing legislative majority muted the original verve. Mired in partisan politics, the government often appeared ineffectual.As with the political arena, French fiction of the 1980s was produced under the shadow of another long-standing French institution--the nouveau roman. Again we find a new direction, a turning-away from the past during the 1980s. Yet there was no outright refusal. There were no manifestos or polemical articles written by budding novelists, no claim to Literature. As Annie Ernaux describes her work Une Femme (1987): "Mon projet est de nature littéraire [...]. Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon, au-dessous de la littérature" (My project is of a literary nature [...]. But I wish to remain, in a certain way, beneath literature (p. 144).This lack of pretension is important, for it helps us better understand the writing of the period. As Davis and Fallaize point out, in the fiction of the Mitterrand years we find a return to history, to the subject, and to storytelling, three areas disdained by the new novelists of the 1950s and 60s (pp. 12-15). But at the same time, there is not an elegiac return to the conventions of the past. There are no didactic tales of Lucien de Rubempré's lost illusions. A good example of this is Patrick Roegiers's Beau Regard (1990), the account of a dinner during which hardly anyone speaks, told by a narrator who knows no one else at the table. Davis and Fallaize note: "In these novels the event is merely an incident, the story no more than an anecdote, and the anecdote merely a fait divers" (p. 147). Although not inconsequential, argue Davis and Fallaize, there is an unquestionable modesty to these texts.In the introduction to their work Davis and Fallaize write: "The aim of the current book is to analyze some of the most important and interesting directions in French fiction through detailed discussions of a selection of texts, all published during François Mitterrand's period as President of the Fifth Republic (1981-95)" (p. 1). This is exactly what they accomplish, selecting six novels--Duras's L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), Pennac's Au bonheur des ogres (The Scapegoat, 1985), Semprun's La Montagne blanche (1986), Echenoz's Lac (Lake, 1989), Guilbert's A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save [End Page 371] my Life, 1990), and Ernaux's Passion simple (Simple Passion, 1991)--and spending one chapter on each. They also discuss some of the important features of the era's fiction including memory, especially of World War II, contemporary culture and postmodernism, and autofiction.However, the book's limited goal also leads to some of its problems. As a whole, the work lacks cohesion. Chapters often read like individual essays. Moreover, although some chapters are well-grounded critically and contextually, others are not. Finally, the conclusion is too brief to synthesize aptly the various topics discussed in the previous chapters. The reader does not have a solid grasp of the fictional landscape of the Mitterrand years, but rather, as the introduction indicated, knowledge of "some of the [...] interesting directions in French fiction."One of the most illuminating chapters considers Daniel... (shrink)

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equippedwith a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of (...) law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government,along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. Athird connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in thistroubled domain.The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. Thecumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quitesane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin aconversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature. (shrink)

is accounted for, among other things, in terms of particular relations between events (or states1) and places or times. Roughly speaking, an event α is said to occur in a place p (or interval t) if the spatial (temporal) extension of α is located in p (or t). Let the predicate ‘Occ’ denote such a relation. From this point of view, part of the content of the above sentences can be associated, respectively, with formulas such as.

Interactive media need their own idioms that exploit the characteristics of the computer based sign. The fact that the reader can physically influence the course of events in the system changes the author's role, since he no longer creates a linear text but anarrative space that the reader can use to generate stories. Although stories are not simulations of the real world, they must still contain recognizable parts where everyday constraints of time and space hold. AI-techniques can be used to (...) implement these constraints. In fact, we suggest that AI is probably best seen as an aesthetic phenomenon. (shrink)

In ‘Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction’, Andrew McGonigal presents new data that a theory of truth in fiction should account for, and argues that the data is best accounted for by his relativist view. I argue against McGonigal’s relativist view and in favour of a more metaphysical view. The key feature of this view is that it is one on which the content of a work of fiction can change over time. Along the way I also argue (...) against Ross Cameron’s contextualist view. (shrink)