We reply to various arguments by Otavio Bueno and Edward Zalta (‘Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism’) against Modal Meinongianism, including that it presupposes, but cannot maintain, a unique denotation for names of fictional characters, and that it is not generalizable to higher-order objects. We individuate the crucial difference between Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory in the former’s resorting to an apparatus of worlds, possible and impossible, for the representational purposes for which the latter resorts to a distinction between two kinds (...) of predication, exemplification and encoding. We show that encoding has fewer forerunners in the history of philosophy than Bueno and Zalta want, and that there’s a reason why the notion has been found baffling by some. (shrink)

Within the framework of Meinongianism, nothingness turns out to have contradictory features—it seems to be an object and not. In this paper, we explore two different kinds of Meinongian accounts of nothingness. The first one is the consistent account, which rejects the contradiction of nothingness, while the second one is the inconsistent account, which accepts the contradiction of nothingness. First of all, after showing that the consistent account of nothingness defended by Jacquette fails, we express some concerns on the general (...) possibility of consistently characterizing nothingness. Secondly, starting from Priest’s inconsistent characterization of nothingness :146–158, 2014b), we will introduce our own inconsistent account. The key idea of our account is to take nothingness as the complement of the totality. Finally, we will make formal sense of it by constructing an inconsistent mereological system, which is the development of the paraconsistent mereology proposed by Weber and Cotnoir. (shrink)

In their paper ‘Zilch’, Oliver and Smiley claim that the word ‘nothing’ can be used as a singular term and that ‘nothing’ as a singular term and the word ‘zilch’ are empty terms, which fail to refer to anything. In this paper, we propose that ‘nothing’ as a singular term and ‘zilch’ can be used to denote null things such as absences, null objects or nothingness. We also claim that, pace their interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘das Nichts’ as an empty term, (...) it should be understood as such a singular term that refers to nothingness. (shrink)

According to Meinongianism, some objects do not exist but we can legitimately refer to and quantify over them. Moreover, Meinongianism standardly regards nonexistent objects as contributing to the truth-makers of sentences about nonexistent objects. Recently, Tim Crane has proposed a weak form of Meinongianism, a reductionism, which denies any contribution of nonexistent objects to truth-making. His reductionism claims that, even though we can truly talk about nonexistent objects by using singular terms and quantifiers about them, any truth about nonexistent objects (...) is reducible to some truths about existent objects. In this paper, we critically examine the reductionism casting some doubts on the reducibility of truths of sentences like ‘a winged pig is possible’ or ‘some winged pig does not exist’ into truths about existent objects. We also argue that the truth of such sentences can be explained by adopting a strong form of Meinongianism which admits contribution of nonexistent objects to the truth-making of such sentences. (shrink)

Existence Since Thales fell into the well while gazing at the stars, philosophers have invested considerable effort in trying to understand what, how and why things exist. Even though much ink has been spilled about those questions, this article focuses on the following three questions: What is the nature of existence? Are there … Continue reading Existence →.

This paper proposes a semantics of anaphora in attitude contexts within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). The paper first focuses on intentional identity, a special kind of cross-attitudinal anaphora. Based on the DRT semantics of attitude reports summarized by Kamp et al. (in: D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (Eds.), Handbook of philosophical logic, 2011), the author proposes a semantics of intentional identity that implements the following two ideas: (1) indefinites and pronouns appearing in attitude contexts introduce _metadiscourse referents_, (...) which represent one’s mental files and record appearances of discourse referents in attitude contexts; and (2) what underlies the relevant kind of anaphoric links between indefinites and pronouns across attitude contexts is _the coordination relation_ between mental files, which is represented by using metadiscourse referents. Next, the paper expands the semantics to cover _de re_ anaphora, in which an anaphoric pronoun in an attitude context takes as its antecedent an expression appearing outside any attitude context. (shrink)

Even though metaphysical dependence has been a subject of a lively debate in contemporary metaphysics, it is rare in such a debate to seriously consider the possibility that the metaphysical dependence relations among the things in the reality is inconsistent. This paper focuses on two philosophers of the Kyoto School, Kitaro Nishida and Keiji Nishitani, who challenge the common supposition that the structure of reality is consistent. In this paper, we show that Nishida’s logic of place is a version of (...) inconsistent foundationalism, according to which absolute nothingness as a foundational element does not depend on anything but depends on itself, and that Nishtani’s theory of the field of emptiness is a version of inconsistent coherentism, according to which emptiness does not depend on anything but depends on everything else (and possibly on itself). (shrink)

Graham Priest, One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness, Oxford University Press, 2014, 272 pp., ISBN 9780199688258.