This book defends the common sense view that there are no such things as fictional people, places, and things. It then creates an argument against fictional realism by finding the faults and problems with the fictional realism argument.
Courageous bold David, a man of war after God’s own heart who killed Goliath, made himself a great enemy in King Saul who because jealous and did everything to kill King David. But through his struggles and wars with Saul and his house, David trusted and sought God in all things. As a result Saul and his son became a nonexistent thing and God gave to David Saul’s house and his master's wives into David’s keeping, as well as the house of Israel and Judah and told him, “if that had been too little, I also would have given you much more!” (2 Samuel 12:8) Consequentially David stated Oh, sing to the LORD a new song! For He has done marvelous things; His right hand and His holy arm have gained Him the victory.” (Psalm 98:1). I will praise You, For You have answered me, And have become my salvation (Psalm 118:21). David praised God for doing marvelous things for him and giving him with His right hand and His holy arm the victory and becoming his salvation in his real battle with Saul! Yes the word of God tells us that in this world, our enemies rise against us and devise plans to hurt and harm us (Psalm 41:7). But in these times, the God of Victory is powerful to crush our enemies. When we tell Him of our trials and tribulations, then God will help us and will make them as a non-existent thing. The Lord who gave David victory over his enemies and blessed him abundantly is no respecter of persons and shows partiality to no one. If we hold onto the Lord Jesus Christ like the psalmist David and we shall overcome all our problems and the people who rise against us in victory.
In this book Terence Parsons revives the older tradition of taking such objects at face value. Using various modern techniques from logic and the philosophy of language, he formulates a metaphysical theory of nonexistent objects. The theory is given a formalization in symbolism rich enough to contain definite descriptions, modal operators, and epistemic contexts, and the book includes a discussion which relates the formalized theory explicitly to English.
The dead are gone. They count for nothing. Yet, if we count the dead, their number is staggering. And they account for most of what is great about civilization. Compared to the greatness of the dead, the accomplishments of the living are paltry. Which is it then: are the dead still there to be counted or not? And if they are still there, where exactly is "there"? We are confronted with the ancient paradox of nonexistence bequeathed us by Parmenides. The mystery of death is the mystery of nonexistence. A successful attempt to provide a metaphysics of death, then, must resolve the paradox of nonexistence. That is the aim of this study. At the same time, the metaphysics of death, of ceasing to exist, must serve as an account of birth, of coming to exist; the primary thesis of this book is that this demands going beyond existence and nonexistence to include what underlies both, which one can call, following tradition, "being." The dead and the unborn are therefore objects that lack existence but not being. Nonexistent objects - not corpses, or skeletons, or memories, all of which are existent objects - are what are "there" to be counted when we count the dead.
Tim Crane addresses the ancient question of how it is possible to think about what does not exist. He argues that the representation of the non-existent is a pervasive feature of our thought about the world, and that to understand thought's representational power ('intentionality') we need to understand the representation of the non-existent.
Towards Non-Being presents an account of the semantics of intentional language - verbs such as 'believes', 'fears', 'seeks', 'imagines'. Graham Priest's account tackles problems concerning intentional states which are often brushed under the carpet in discussions of intentionality, such as their failure to be closed under deducibility. Drawing on the work of the late Richard Routley (Sylvan), it proceeds in terms of objects that may be either existent or non-existent, atworlds that may be either possible or impossible. Since Russell, non-existent objects have had a bad press in Western philosophy; Priest mounts a full-scale defence. In the process, he offers an account of both fictional and mathematical objects as non-existent.The book will be of central interest to anyone who is concerned with intentionality in the philosophy of mind or philosophy of language, the metaphysics of existence and identity, the philosophy or fiction, the philosophy of mathematics, or cognitive representation in AI.
Nonexistence is ubiquitous, yet mysterious. This volume explores some of the most puzzling questions about non-being and nonexistence, and offers answers from diverse philosophical perspectives. The contributors draw on analytic, continental, Buddhist, and Jewish philosophical traditions, and the topics range from metaphysics to ethics, from philosophy of science to philosophy of language, and beyond.
This book explores the thought of Alexius Meinong, a philosopher known for his unconventional theory of reference and predication. The chapters cover a natural progression of topics, beginning with the origins of Gegenstandstheorie, Meinong’s theory of objects, and his discovery of assumptions as a fourth category of mental states to supplement his teacher Franz Brentano’s references to presentations, feelings, and judgments. The chapters explore further the meaning and metaphysics of fictional and other nonexistent intended objects, fine points in Meinongian object theory are considered and new and previously unanticipated problems are addressed. The author traces being and non-being and aspects of beingless objects including objects in fiction, ideal objects in scientific theory, objects ostensibly referred to in false science and false history and intentional imaginative projection of future states of affairs. The chapters focus on an essential choice of conceptual, logical, semantic, ontic and more generally metaphysical problems and an argument is progressively developed from the first to the final chapter, as key ideas are introduced and refined. Meinong studies have come a long way from Bertrand Russell’s off-target criticisms and recent times have seen a rise of interest in a Meinongian approach to logic and the theory of meaning. New thinkers see Meinong as a bridge figure between analytic and continental thought, thanks to the need for an adequate semantics of meaning in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, making this book a particularly timely publication.
This book is a crash course in effective reasoning, meant to catapult you into a world where you start to see things how they really are, not how you think they are. The focus of this book is on logical fallacies, which loosely defined, are simply errors in reasoning. With the reading of each page, you can make significant improvements in the way you reason and make decisions. Logically Fallacious is one of the most comprehensive collections of logical fallacies with all original examples and easy to understand descriptions, perfect for educators, debaters, or anyone who wants to improve his or her reasoning skills. "Expose an irrational belief, keep a person rational for a day. Expose irrational thinking, keep a person rational for a lifetime." - Bo Bennett This 2021 Edition includes dozens of more logical fallacies with many updated examples.
Annotation Originally developed for introductory courses on Eastern religious traditions, this popular anthology offers readings from primary texts of India, China, and Japan. With this second edition, the editors have expanded on existing texts and added new introductions to provide a better context for the excerpts as well as a better sense of historical developments. A section on Ch'an/Zen and excerpts from the writings of Ge Hong, representing the central concerns of Daoism, have been included. A section on modern China includes a poem written by Mao, exhibiting his Daoist sensibilities; there's also material about Falun Gong. A revised chapter on Buddhism presents the voices of modern Buddhist writers, including the Dalai Lama. Throughout the volume, women's voices have been added.