Online research in philosophy

This essay explains why creationism about fictional characters is an abject failure. Creationism about fictional characters is the view that fictional objects are created by the authors of the novels in which they first appear. This essay shows that, when the details of creationism are filled in, the hypothesis becomes far more puzzling than the linguistic data it is used to explain. No matter how the creationist identifies where, when and how fictional objects are created, the proposal conflicts with other strong intuitions we have about fictional characters. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us Digg Reddit Technorati What's this?

The received view in philosophy of biology is that biological taxa (species and higher taxa) do not have essences. Recently some philosophers (Boyd, Devitt, Griffiths, LaPorte, Okasha, and Wilson) have suggested new forms of biological essentialism. They argue that according to these new forms of essentialism biological taxa do have essences. This paper critically evaluates the new biological essentialism. The paper’s thesis is that the costs of adopting the new biological essentialism are many, yet the benefits are none. So there is no compelling reason to resurrect essentialism concerning biological taxa.

The received view in the philosophy of biology is that biological taxa (species and higher taxa) do not have essences. Recently, some philosophers (Boyd, Devitt, Griffiths, LaPorte, Okasha, and Wilson) have suggested new forms of biological essentialism. They argue that according to these new forms of essentialism, biological taxa do have essences. This article critically evaluates the new biological essentialism. This article’s thesis is that the costs of adopting the new biological essentialism are many, yet the benefits are none, so there is no compelling reason to resurrect essentialism concerning biological taxa.

The author puts forth an approach to propositional attitude contexts based upon the view that one does not have beliefs of ordinary extensional entitiessimpliciter. Rather, one has beliefs of such entities as presented in various manners. Roughly, these are treated as beliefs of ordered pairs — the first member of which is the ordinary extensional entity and the second member of which is a predicate that it satisfies. Such an approach has no difficulties with problems involving identity, such as of The Morning Star and The Evening Star (section 1). Given the second members of the pairs, the modes of presentation, it is quite natural to allow exportation everywhere. There is no need for essentialism. (One also can have non-essentialistic modal logic if one grants analyticity or the like.) (section 2). Given that the second member of the pair need only be one that is satisfied by the entity that is the first member (and need not be specificative), the method has no difficulties when one is concerned only with discriminations (and not specifications) (section 3). When this method is combined with the Frege-Carnap method of descriptions, fictional entities can be accommodated; Goodman''s unicorn-picture and the like can be brought within a Tarskian semantics; and Geach''s difficulties with intentional identity appear to be handled (section 4). Given the author''s ordered pair construals, there appears to be no additional need for notional construals; i.e., the author''s one unified method appears satisfactory for dealing with both traditionalde re (relational) andde dicto (notional) construals. The Paradox of the Knower and the like do not appear formulatable against the author''s approach. (section 5). The author also argues against the basic principles behind the Church-Langford translation argument (section 6).

Pace Necessitism – roughly, the view that existence is not contingent – essential properties provide necessary conditions for the existence of objects. Sufficiency properties, by contrast, provide sufficient conditions, and individual essences provide necessary and sufficient conditions. This paper explains how these kinds of properties can be used to illuminate the ontological status of merely possible objects and to construct a respectable possibilist ontology. The paper also reviews two points of interaction between essentialism and modal logic. First, we will briefly see the challenge that arises against S4 from flexible essential properties; as well as the moves available to block it. After this, the emphasis is put on the Barcan Formula (BF), and on why it is problematic for essentialists. As we will see, Necessitism can accommodate both (BF) and essential properties. What necessitists cannot do at the same time is to continue to understanding essential properties as providing necessary conditions for the existence of individuals; against what might be for some a truism.

Charlotte Witt University of New Hampshire Abstract: In this paper I distinguish among different theories of gender essentialism and sketch out a taxonomy of gender essentialisms. I focus primarily on the difference between essentialism about a kind and essentialism about an individual. I propose that there is an interesting and useful form of gender essentialism that pertains to social individuals. And I argue that this form of gender essentialism, which I call uniessentialism, is not vulnerable to standard, feminist criticisms of gender essentialism.

In the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature and especially literary theory, the paradigmatic way of understanding the beliefs and attitudes expressed in works of literary narrative fiction is to attribute them to an implied author, an entity which the literary critic Wayne C. Booth introduced in his influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction. Roughly put, the implied author is an entity between the actual author and the narrator whose beliefs and attitudes cannot be appropriately ascribed to the actual author. Over the decades, this “the author’s second self,” a construct the actual author is seen to create in her act of writing, has gained an established place in literary theory. In the philosophy of literature, in turn, the implied author has evolved into multiple entities; it has been represented and developed as, for instance, “the postulated author” (Alexander Nehamas), “the fictional author” (Gregory Currie) and “the model author” (Umberto Eco).

The aim of this paper is to suggest that although the implied author, and its philosophical counterparts, sheds light on certain types of narratives, it is insufficient in approaches which emphasize the truth-claims conveyed by a work. In what follows, I try to show that, first, from an ontological point of view, actual assertions in literary fiction, if any, have to be attributed to the actual author and, second, that the question of truth-claiming in and by literary fiction is an epistemological matter concerning the actual intentions of the author.

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional individual. So is his favorite pipe. Our pre-theoretical intuition says that neither of them is real. It says that neither of them really, or actually, exists. It also says that there is a sense in which they do exist, namely, a sense in which they exist “in the world of” the Sherlock Holmes stories. Our pre-theoretical intuition says in general of any fictional individual that it does not actually exist but exists “in the world of” the relevant fiction. I wish to defend this pretheoretical intuition. To do so, I need to defend two claims: that fictional individuals do not actually exist, and that they exist “in the world of” the relevant fiction. The aim of this paper is to defend the first claim.

Th ere is much controversy surrounding the nature of the relation between fictional individuals and possible individuals. Some have argued that no fictional individual is a possible individual; others have argued that (some) fictional individuals just are (merely) possible individuals. In this paper, I off er further grounds for believing the theory of fictional individuals defended by Amie Thomasson,viz., Artifactualism, by arguing that her view best allows one to make sense of this puzzling relation. More specifically, when we realize that the view allows for an identification of merely possible individuals with fictional individuals, we seethat the utility, and hence the level of credence lent to Artifactualism, is increased. After arguing for this thesis, I respond to three of the most pressing worries.

Creationism is the conjunction of the following theses: (i) fictional individuals (e.g. Sherlock Holmes) actually exist; (ii) fictional names (e.g., 'Holmes') are at least sometimes genuinely referential; (iii) fictional individuals are the creations of the authors who first wrote (or spoke, etc.) about them. CA Creationism is the conjunction of (i) - (iii) and the following thesis: (iv) fictional individuals are contingently existing abstracta; they are non-concrete artifacts of our world and various other possible worlds. TakashiYagisawa has recently provided a number of arguments designed to show that Creationism is unjustified. I here critically examine three of his challenges to CA Creationism. I argue that each fails to undermine this version of Creationism.