This article explores some innovations in the concept of identity in contemporary science fiction film. Using a narrative-semiotic method of analysis, the article discusses an emerging trend in science fiction that questions mainstream cultural beliefs regarding motivations for action and definitions of individual agency. Focusing on Alex Proyas's Dark City and Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, the article traces the ways in which this trend rearranges elements in narrative positioning to bring to light relational possibilities that challenge privileged attitudes toward (...) who we are and why we act the way we do. The selected films deal creatively with questions concerning the causal eects of past events, origins, or heritage, and give innovative answers to complex philosophical issues about the nature of reality. At the same time, they retain a popular aesthetic and a classical narrative structure. Their common characteristic is a narrative program composed of signs of resistance to notions of a fixed identity 'caused' by biography or genetic inheritance. These signs, furthermore, form the basis of unconventional interpretations of self and action that serve as catalysts in dismantling outmoded definitions of identity. The article explores these issues following a content-based approach that focuses on how agents and acts are constructed on the story level. (shrink)

The main aim of this dissertation is to model the different ways in which we use language when we engage with fiction. This main aim subdivides itself into a number of puzzles. We all know that dragons do not exist. Yet, when I read the Harry Potter novels, I do accept the existence of dragons. How do we keep such fictional truths separate from ‘ordinary’ non-fictional truths? What is the difference between Tolkien writing down all sorts of falsities, and (...) a liar who also says all sorts of untrue things? How can it be true that Frodo was born in the Shire while it is also true that he was invented by Tolkien? Given that a fiction such as Pride and Prejudice is not about the actual world, how can I learn things about 19th century etiquette in England by reading this novel? -/- I develop a coherent semantic analysis of these different puzzles: the ‘workspace account’. This theory is an extension of Stalnaker’s famous pragmatic ‘common ground’ framework. In this framework, assertions are modelled as proposals to update the ‘common ground’ (the set of shared assumptions) between conversational interlocutors. (shrink)

Not least among the many enigmas attending the origins and development of the first vernacular lyric in the European Middle Ages is the existence of at least twenty women poets who lived in southern France from about the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century and who participated in the highly conventionalized poetic system created by the troubadours, those humble poetlovers who sang to their beloved as domna, the superior lady. In periods when the tides of feminism are high these women's voices (...) have insistently claimed our attention, as we try to understand their songs and puzzle over their very existence. Their poetic inventions require us in particular to pay close attention to the subtle, even elusive, concept of voice—its relation to the identity of the poet and the poem's speaker, the elements that characterize its expression, the multiplicity of images created by different voices, and so on. If we are willing to listen and analyze carefully, the trobairitz have much to teach us about the way women poets enter into and find their place in a traditional poetic system created by male poets. Their songs demonstrate with intricate complexity the way poetic fictions play with cultural, literary, and social definitions of man and woman, masculine and feminine; their poems offer valuable warnings about the pitfalls involved in generalizing women into woman. (shrink)

The death story of Jesus of Nazareth has traditionally been understood as a matter of historical fact. The various versions of the story would seem to confirm a documented death scene. Nevertheless, critical appraisals of this material have raised numerous questions regarding the passion story. This article considers how the very structure of the story is a vital clue to the way in which the death of Jesus was invented. The Jewish tale of the suffering and vindication of the (...) innocent one provides the memory locus for discovering meaning in the fate of Jesus. We find that the basic fact of the death tale of Jesus is that it was a fiction, authorising further elaborations for those who understood the craft of memory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Pleasures of FictionDenis DuttonHuman Beings Expend staggering amounts of time and resources on creating and experiencing art and entertainment—music, dancing, and static visual arts. Of all of the arts, however, it is the category of fictional story-telling that across the globe today is the most intense focus of what amounts to a virtual human addiction. A recent government study in Britain showed that if you add together annual (...) attendances in plays and cinema with hours watching television drama, the average Briton spends roughly 6% of all waking life watching dramatic performances. And that figure does not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and thrillers, as well as so-called serious fictions, old and new.The origins of this obsession with comic and dramatic fictions are lost in remote prehistory, as lost as the origins of language itself. But like language, we know the obsession with fiction is universal: stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are independently invented in all known cultures, literate or not, having advanced technologies or not. Wherever printing arrives, it is used to reproduce fictions. Whenever television appears in the world, soap operas soon show up on the schedule. Both the forms that fiction takes and the ideas, types of characters, and kinds of conflict that make up its content can be shown to be strikingly similar across cultures. It has specialist practitioners—rhapsodes, novelists, playwrights, actors—and is governed both informally with stylistic conventions and sometimes formally—for example, by censorship laws. A love of fiction is as universal as governance, marriage, jokes, religion, and the incest taboo. [End Page 453]The question for any general aesthetics is: Why? Joseph Carroll is a literary theorist who has applied his probing mind over the last decade to the origins, nature, and functions of literary experience. His new collection of essays and reviews, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (Routledge, $85.00 boards, $23.95 paper) looks at literature and literary theory through the lens of evolutionary psychology. At the same time, Carroll's eye is that of an extremely perceptive literary critic. In fact, I would judge him to be one of the most acute and knowledgeable readers of fiction I've ever encountered. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that he is sometimes dubious, or even scathing, about evolutionary explanations of literature that have been offered up by writers whose grasp of psychology exceeds, in his opinion, their command of high literature. His complaints, however, are not to the fundamental notion that evolution by natural and sexual selection have made human beings into the story-loving animals they have become: his adjustments are intended to increase the accuracy and usefulness of Darwin's revolution. However critical he is of evolutionary psychologists, Carroll remains a Darwinian through and through.Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of literature is through an account of human nature that builds from the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings, far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are central to some of its most human functions. The structures of basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a species, as Carroll describes it, that "is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and postmenopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artifacts." Such a list alone, he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and structure.Some of the mental processes that grow from... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 130-131 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on 'The Birth of Tragedy.' James I. Porter. Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 449. Cloth, $60.00. Paper, $19.95. James I. Porter. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on 'The Birth of (...) Tragedy.' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 224. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $16.95. Every year an astonishing number of books are published on Nietzsche. Here are two more from a single author. James I. Porter's thesis--in both of them--is that "The Birth of Tragedy does not mark a break in Nietzsche's thinking, whether away from his philological understanding of antiquity or toward... emancipation from metaphysics" (Philology of the Future, 2). Perhaps to lend drama to his case, he assumes an unwarranted degree of unanimity among those who see a break between the philological writings of the young Nietzsche and the philosophical ones written later. But Porter's elaboration of his own thesis is quite persuasive nonetheless. He shows that essential tenets of Nietzsche's later philosophy can be found in his early philological writings, and that Nietzsche's interpretations of the ancient Greeks were as ambiguous, "mythological," and self-critical as his later books. In this way, Porter extensively reinterprets Nietzsche's early writing.The Invention of Dionysus is the shorter and more closely argued of the two books. Here Porter attempts to show that in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche both began his exposé of the fictional nature of all metaphysics and recognized that metaphysics would forever haunt the human mind. Porter asserts--more forcefully than earlier authors--that Nietzsche was decisively influenced by Friedrich Albert Lange in this; indeed he ascribes much of what is thought most characteristic of Nietzsche's philosophy to Lange! But what Porter takes away from Nietzsche and awards to Lange in originality, he returns to Nietzsche in subtlety.Porter contends that throughout his career Nietzsche defended an "embattled position" (18), attempting to preserve both appearance and metaphysics as necessary dimensions of human consciousness. This is perhaps Porter's contribution: to assert that Nietzsche never thought he had abolished metaphysics in favor of appearance, as so many writers have claimed. According to Porter, Nietzsche understood in The Birth of Tragedy and throughout his career that metaphysics could never be abolished; that the act of trying to abolish metaphysics is itself inevitably metaphysical, and that any philosophy of appearances including his own must also be metaphysical. Porter characterizes Nietzsche's rhetorical stance as "mythological."Porter quotes a passage from The Birth of Tragedy to show that Nietzsche was both eager to reveal the mythological status of Greek metaphysics, and fully aware that his own efforts to reveal it were mythological as well: "It is the fate of every myth to creep by degrees into the narrow limits of some alleged historical reality, and to be treated by some later generation as a unique fact with historical claims"(45). So if readers take Nietzsche's arguments at face value, that is understandable; but it does not make them any less mythological. According to Porter, this stance gives the lie to claims that The Birth of Tragedy was "still" metaphysical. And it should establish that from the first Nietzsche had a more subtle view of his project than previously acknowledged.Porter makes this enduring mythological stance the central issue for interpreting Nietzsche's oeuvre. Interesting as this is, it makes Nietzsche out to be impossibly consistent and prescient about his later writing. And it leaves him an oddly disembodied thinker--quite contrary to his own understanding of the philosophical career. The obvious contortions [End Page 130] in Nietzsche's early writing--rooted in his attempt to be true to his own best insights while maintaining a strenuous discipleship to Richard Wagner--are entirely glossed over. While this might be... (shrink)

What is commonly known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, regarded as representing a unitary Copenhagen point of view, differs significantly from Bohr's complementarity interpretation, which does not employ wave packet collapse in its account of measurement and does not accord the subjective observer any privileged role in measurement. It is argued that the Copenhagen interpretation is an invention of the mid‐1950s, for which Heisenberg is chiefly responsible, various other physicists and philosophers, including Bohm, Feyerabend, Hanson, and Popper, having (...) further promoted the invention in the service of their own philosophical agendas. (shrink)

The future of society, like any other structure, is built piece by piece. Whether conscious of it or not, the ability of each person to think reflexively about the past today lays the foundations for tomorrow. This is certainly evident in the spheres of education and politics, for example, where there are many who are self-aware of their role in “inventing the future.” However, creative practices in literature and imagination are also sites for architects of what is possible for the (...) future. On the micro-level, humanity and society are shaped by the forms of society's collective imaginations: they may be…. (shrink)

There are many passages in ancient literature which depict an imaginary existence different from the hardships of real life-an existence blessed with Nature's bounty, untroubled by strife or want. Naturally this happy state is always placed somewhere or sometime outside normal human experience, whether ‘off the map’ in some remote quarter of the world, or in Elysium after death, or in the dim future or the distant past. Such an imaginary time of bliss in the past or the future has (...) become known as the ‘golden age’. This is the name which modern scholars generally give to the ancient belief. The phrase is often echoed by modern poets. The same language has been transferred from the unknown to the known, and it has become a commonplace to describe an outstanding period of history or literature as a ‘golden age’. (shrink)

This article questions the belief expressed in various histories of pharmacy that the tenth-century Arab physician Avicenna introduced the tradition of coating pills with gold and silver. Although an examination of his Canon documents Avicenna's interest in the medicinal application of gold and silver, no mention is made of coating pills. Nor do other Islamic physicians seem to have been familiar with this practice, any more than such medieval European authors as Arnaldus of Villanova, Raymund Lull or Johannes de Rupescissa. (...) The same is true of medicinal compendia representative of later periods, such as the Ortus sanitatis, Valerius Cordus' Dispensatorium or the Secrets of Alessio Piemontese. The earliest known mention of coating pills with precious metals occurs in a non-medical book, The Golden Fleece , and the earliest mention in the professional literature seems to appear only in the second half of the seventeenth century. The practice of coating pills with gold and silver was to be practiced in Europe into the first half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Nietzsche was a philosopher, not a biologist, Nevertheless his philosophical thought was deeply influenced by ideas emerging from the evolutionary biology of the nineteenth century. His relationship to the Darwinism of his time is difficult to disentangle. It is argued that he was in a sense an unwitting Darwinist. It follows that his philosophical thought is of considerable interest to those concerned to develop an evolutionary biology of mankind. His approach can be likened to that of an extraterrestrial sociobiologist studying (...) clever beasts... in some out of the way corner of the universe ... It is shown how be uses this viewpoint to account for the origin of the central psychobiology of humankind: for dualistic philosophies, such as that of Descartes (which Ryle famously called the official doctrine), for human notions of truth and falsehood, being and becoming, and for other fundamental concepts of Western philosophy and science. All these, he argues, are no more and no less than the necessary adaptations of a zoological species, Homo sapiens, in its struggle for life in a Darwinian world. It is concluded that Nietzsche was the first philosopher to accept and use in their full depth the philosophical implications of nineteeth-century evolutionism, implications which are still resisted to this day. It is also argued that this interpretation of Nietzsche's aphoristic writings provides them with an organic consistency. (shrink)

The paper presents the basic data about the life of Fritz Jahr , the German teacher and theologian who, for the first time in history, in an article from 1927, used the term ‘bio-ethics’ and proposed a concept of a new discipline based upon the “bioethical imperative” – a revision of the Kantian categorical imperative, extended onto animals and plants. While some data, however, about the publications by Fritz Jahr have been known , the biographical background of Jahr was completely (...) unexplored as yet. The present paper briefly investigates also the chronology of the discovery of Jahr’s work in about 1997, shifting the date and the location of the conception of bioethics for about half a century back and from one continent to the other. (shrink)

Peter Byrne tells the story of Hugh Everett III (1930-1982), whose "many worlds" theory of multiple universes has had a profound impact on physics and philosophy. Using Everett's unpublished papers (recently discovered in his son's basement) and dozens of interviews with his friends, colleagues, and surviving family members, Byrne paints, for the general reader, a detailed portrait of the genius who invented an astonishing way of describing our complex universe from the inside. Everett's mathematical model (called the "universal wave (...) function") treats all possible events as "equally real", and concludes that countless copies of every person and thing exist in all possible configurations spread over an infinity of universes: many worlds. Afflicted by depression and addictions, Everett strove to bring rational order to the professional realms in which he played historically significant roles. In addition to his famous interpretation of quantum mechanics, Everett wrote a classic paper in game theory; created computer algorithms that revolutionized military operations research; and performed pioneering work in artificial intelligence for top secret government projects. He wrote the original software for targeting cities in a nuclear hot war; and he was one of the first scientists to recognize the danger of nuclear winter. As a Cold Warrior, he designed logical systems that modeled "rational" human and machine behaviors, and yet he was largely oblivious to the emotional damage his irrational personal behavior inflicted upon his family, lovers, and business partners. He died young, but left behind a fascinating record of his life, including correspondence with such philosophically inclined physicists as Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener, and John Wheeler. These remarkable letters illuminate the long and often bitter struggle to explain the paradox of measurement at the heart of quantum physics. In recent years, Everett's solution to this mysterious problem - the existence of a universe of universes - has gained considerable traction in scientific circles, not as science fiction, but as an explanation of physical reality. (shrink)

Throughout the last decade, calls for a return to materiality have reverberated within the humanities and social sciences. Few, however, have noticed that this return has also entailed a return to fiction, as the new theoretical writings on matter regularly include elements of storytelling, fabulation or other genres of invention. This article asks why this alliance between new materialism and fiction has come about: Why do scholars united by a common interest in ‘getting real’ consistently utilize a type (...) of discourse defined precisely by not committing itself to reality? Examining works by Jane Bennett, Dominic Pettman, Stacy Alaimo, Astrida Neimanis, Donna Haraway, and Rebekah Sheldon, the article explores this question by tracing three modes of fictionality in new materialism distinguished by inventing non/human entanglements, scientific knowledge, and future societies respectively. Ultimately, the article argues that fictionality is a particularly attractive tool for attempts to transcend anthropocentric regimes of truth. (shrink)

The short-lived emperor Macrinus had a son whose name, inscriptions reveal, was M. Opellius Antoninus Diadumenianus. Little is known about this figure, who is remembered through brief references in the late Roman breviaries and in Herodian, and in a short biography in the collection of imperial lives now known as the Historia Augusta. In 1889, Dessau argued that the lives of the Historia Augusta, which present themselves as written by six different authors in the Age of Constantine, were in fact (...) written by a single writer closer to the year 400, an argument that has now all but prevailed in scholarly circles. Some of the biographies depend on reliable sources, at least in part, and thus can provide actual historical information; others do not, and are mostly or entirely the result of authorial invention. The life of Diadumenianus fits clearly in the latter category. The secondary lives of the Historia Augusta contain no original information, but rather are constructed from a combination of information derived from their ‘parent’ life and invented fiction. So, for example, the life of the Caesar Aelius combines information from the life of Hadrian with fiction, the life of the usurper Avidius Cassius combines information from the life of Marcus Aurelius with fiction, and the lives of Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus combine information from the life of Severus with fiction. In the case of Diadumenianus, the life is even more thoroughly fictional, since the life of Macrinus from which it is derived is itself a kind of secondary life; Cameron suggests that Marius Maximus, the probable source for the author of the Historia Augusta, treated Macrinus as a usurper in the life of Elagabalus. Almost every detail of the life of Diadumenianus is therefore the fictive invention of the author. (shrink)

What happens us emotionally when we read a work of fiction? According to some philosophers our emotional engagement with fiction gives rise to a paradox and involves either irrationality or participation in a game of make believe. I argue that an Object Theory in a meinongian style, by supporting a realistic perspective on fictional emotions, is able to dissolve the paradox of fiction by providing a positive ontological account of fictional entities (and the properties characterizing them).

This paper is prompted by the publication of a book by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Andrew S. Curran on the contest launched in 1739 by the Bordeaux Academy on the origin of black skin and hair. The most influential work submitted as part of this contest was an essay by Pierre Barrère. This paper has two parts, one devoted to a review of the book, the other to the discovery of a cogent text, which was certainly written by a (...) member of the Lyon Academy, Guillaume Rey. Rey criticized Barrère’s essay and debunked various beliefs about the origin of black skin that were commonly held at the time of its publication. (shrink)

Literary fiction is of crucial importance in human life. It is a source of understanding and insight into the nature of the human condition, yet ever since Plato, philosophers have struggled to provide a plausible explanation of how this can be the case. For surely the fictionality - the sheer invented character - of the literary text means that fiction presents not our world, but other worlds? In Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson offers (...) a novel and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and everyday life, and shows how literature can give us an understanding of our world without literally being about our world. (shrink)

According to Adams and his colleagues, fictional sentences, i.e. sentences featuring fictional names, lack any truth value. To explain intuitions to the contrary, they refer to the pragmatics of fictional assertions and claim that sincere utterances of those sentences generate some conversational implicatures. They argue that all who take fictional sentences to have a truth value tend to mistake implicatures of assertions of such sentences with their literal content. The aim of the paper is to show that this argument is (...) not convincing.The challenge being that it doesn’t provide any satisfactory explanation as to what is negated in seemingly genuine disagreement cases in which fictional sentences are asserted. Sentential negation usually doesn’t affect (i.e. negate) a proposition which is conversationally implied, especially when it comes to the manner implicature. And, as I argue, an advocate of the pragmatic defence should maintain that this is the kind of conversational implicature that the assertion of fictional sentences generates. (shrink)

My goal is to reflect on the phenomenon of inadvertent creation and argue that—various objections to the contrary—it doesn’t undermine the view that fictional characters are abstract artifacts. My starting point is a recent challenge by Jeffrey Goodman that is originally posed for those who hold that fictional characters and mythical objects alike are abstract artifacts. The challenge: if we think that astronomers like Le Verrier, in mistakenly hypothesizing the planet Vulcan, inadvertently created an abstract artifact, then the “inadvertent creation” (...) element turns out to be inescapable yet theoretically unattractive. Based on considerations about actually existing concrete objects featured in fictional works (as Napoleon is in Tolstoy’s War and Peace), I argue that independently of one’s stand on mythical objects, admitting fictional characters as abstract artifacts is enough to give rise to the challenge at hand; yet this very point serves to undermine the challenge, indicating that inadvertent creation is not nearly as worrisome as Goodman suggests. Indeed, the inadvertent creation phenomenon’s generality extends far beyond objects of fiction and myth, and I will use this observation to counter a further objection. Taking fictional characters (and mythical objects) to be abstract artifacts therefore remains a viable option. (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)

Eleven original essays discuss a range of puzzling philosophical questions about fictional characters, and more generally about fictional objects. For example, they ask questions like the following: Do they really exist? What would fictional objects be like if they existed? Do they exist eternally? Are they created? Who by? When and how? Can they be destroyed? If so, how? Are they abstract or concrete? Are they actual? Are they complete objects? Are they possible objects? How many fictional objects are there? (...) What are their identity conditions? What kinds of attitudes can we have towards them? This volume will be a landmark in the philosophical debate about fictional objects, and will influence higher-level debates within metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

What is it to have and act on a personal ideal? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might imaginatively think “I am a philosopher” by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she isn’t yet what she regards herself as being. J. David Velleman develops the thought that action-by-ideal involves a kind of fictional self-conception. My aim is to expand our (...) thinking about personal ideals by developing another way of understanding them. On this view action-by-ideal involves a kind of metaphorical self-conception. I investigate some salient differences between these views with the aim of understanding the different perspectives they take on the rationality of action-by-ideal. Where the fiction view runs into problems of literary coherence, the metaphor view exploits the richness of poetic invention. But action-by-ideal is a complex phenomenon about which there may be no tidy story to be told. This paper is an attempt to clarify and understand more of this messy terrain. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

Fictional characters are awkward creatures. They are described as being girls, detectives, and cats; as being famous, based on real people, and well developed, and as being paradigmatic examples of things that don’t exist. It’s not hard to see that there are tensions between these various descriptions—how can something that is a detective not exist?—and there is a range of views designed to make sense of the pre-theoretical data. Fictional realists hold that we should accept that fictional characters are part (...) of ‘the furniture of our world’. Others are fictional anti-realists, who hold instead that our world does not contain any such things. In this article, I deploy an independently motivated metaontology to defend a novel version of fictional anti-realism. On the view I develop and defend, the central task we face is that of explaining facts concerning fictional characters, where the relevant notion of explanation is distinctively metaphysical in character. Fictional anti-realism emerges as the plausible thesis that facts about fictional entities can be completely explained in terms of the existence and features of other things. (shrink)

Some infamous memoirs have turned out to be chock-full of fibs. Should we care? Why not say—as many have—that all autobiography is fiction, that accurate memory is impossible, that we start lying as soon as we start narrating, and that it doesn’t matter anyway, since made-up stories are just as good as true ones? Because, well, every part of that is misleading. First, we don’t misremember absolutely everything; second, we have other sources to draw on; third, story form affects (...) only significance, not facts; fourth, fiction and nonfiction offer different affordances, benefits, and delights. And since we need both kinds of writing, we have to insist on honesty in memoir; we have to stop saying that everything is invention and that fibs don’t matter. If memoirs could never be trusted, who would still read them? In a world without truth, what exactly would we speak to power? (shrink)

The verb 'imagine' admits of perspectival modification: we can imagine things from above, from a distant point of view, or from the point of view of a Russian. But in such cases, there need be no person, either real or imagined, who is above or distant from what is imagined, or who has the point of view of a Russian. We call this the puzzle of perspectival displacement. This paper sets out the puzzle, shows how it does not just concern (...) language, but also states of imagining themselves, and then presents a solution. The solution draws on the idea that many reports of imagining conceal a distinctive kind of question, and such concealed questions have an extra argument place for (what we will call) an experiencer from whose perspective things are imagined. This solution has a range of advantages over other proposals in the literature, and helps to advance two debates concerning perspectival engagement with fiction. (shrink)

This article looks at the problematic witnessing envisioned in Chinese American writer Ken Liu’s speculative fiction “The Man Who Ended History – A Documentary,” in which the back-to-the-past virtu...

Science is popularly understood as being an ideal of impartial algorithmic objectivity that provides us with a realistic description of the world down to the last detail. The essays collected in this book—written by some of the leading experts in the field—challenge this popular image right at its heart, taking as their starting point that science trades not only in truth, but in fiction, too. With case studies that range from physics to economics and to biology, _Fictions in Science_ (...) reveals that fictions are as ubiquitous in scientific narratives and practice as they are in any other human endeavor, including literature and art. Of course scientific activity, most prominently in the formal sciences, employs logically precise algorithmic thinking. However, the key to the predictive and technological success of the empirical sciences might well lie elsewhere—perhaps even in scientists’ extraordinary creative imagination instead. As these essays demonstrate, within the bounds of what is empirically possible, a scientist’s capacity for invention and creative thinking matches that of any writer or artist. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Val Plumwoods call for writers to engage in ‘the struggle to think differently’. Specifically, she calls writers to engage in the task of opening up an experience of nature as powerful and as possessing agency. I argue that a critical component of opening up who or what can be understood as possessing agency involves challenging the conception of time as linear, externalised and absolute, particularly in as much as it has guided Western conceptions of (...) process, change and invention. I explore this through anthropologist Carol Greenhouse's claim that social conceptions of time can be read as theories of agency. Thus, in seeking to respond to Plumwood’s call to think differently, the question becomes: what kind of writing would enable a fundamental re-thinking of agency without, however, ignoring the way Western notions of agency have been shaped by linear accounts of time? I look to Jacques Derrida's work as one example. I first locate the possibility of re-writing time and agency in the experiential aspects of his writing, which I argue interrupt both the reader’s sense of agency and linear models of reading. But further, I connect Derrida’s work directly with Plumwood’s by examining how his deconstruction of the Western concept of invention may enable another account of creative change that could reshape what counts as ‘agency’ within the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This paper asks the question of how we can situate the educational subject in what Luciano Floridi has defined as an ‘informational ontology’. It will suggest that Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler offer paths toward rethinking the educational subject that lend themselves to an informational future, as well as speculating on how, with this knowledge, we can educate to best equip ourselves and others for our increasingly digital world. Jacques Derrida thought the concept of the subject was ‘indispensable’ as a (...) function but did not subscribe to or accept any particular theory of how a subject could be defined or developed because it was always situated in and as a context. Following Derrida, Bernard Stiegler explains in Technics and Time: 1 that ‘the relation binding the “who” and the “what” is invention’. As such, the separation between self and world can be seen as artificial, including if this world is perceived wholly or partly as technological, digital or informational. If this is the case, a responsibility is placed on the educator and their part in ‘inventing’ this distinction for future generations. How this invention of the educational subject is negotiated is therefore one the many philosophical tasks for digital pedagogy. (shrink)

Pierre Olivier distinguishes between two radically different concep-tions of legal fictions: on the one hand, the conception of legal fiction developed by the commentators of the Middle Ages, which culminates in Bartolus’s defini-tion; on the other hand, the conception developed by the 19th Century German scholar Gustav Demelius, who was followed, among others, by Joseph Esser. The main difference between the two approaches is individuated by Olivier in the fact that, while the former consider legal fictions as essentially implying (...) an actual fic-tional element, the latter deny this. In other words, according to Demelius and those who follow him, the term “legal fiction” is a misnomer. In this article, I first provide an example of a legal fiction. In the second and third section, I rely on this example to analyze and assess the two competing accounts. Finally, in the fourth part, I advance a syncretistic account of legal fictions, which should thus point to a possible middle ground between the two competing positions. As it is often the case, there is probably some truth to both accounts; the problem – I will argue – is that both theories tell only a part and not the whole of the story. More precisely, it will be argued that legal fictions essentially involve the structure of “as if”-statements, and that the one-sidedness of the two competing accounts derives from the fact that one focuses too much on the “if”-component (the assumption), whereas the other focuses too much on the “as”-component (the comparison). (shrink)