Non-existent Things Research Articles

Linguacultural prerequisites for the creation of new lexical units in dystopias (on the example of the lexical-thematic group "Names of socio-political organizations" in George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984")

This research studies the mechanisms of the formation of the author's vocabulary in the text of a dystopia. This vocabulary is called non-existent designations of literary reality. Extra linguistic factors influence the formation of the author's neologism. One of the factors is culture, which influenced the formation of linguistic consciousness. A literary work is a space in which the linguistic embodiment of the author's image of the world, his linguistic culture is concentrated. The material of the research is the text of the dystopian novel "1984" by George Orwell. Dystopia is of interest as one of the fantastic subgenres. The structure of the dystopian world is constructed on the author's fantasy, demonstrating non-existent things. Non-existent denotations are named according to this genre specificity. In the composition of the novel, the depiction of contradictions in the life of society and an undesirable political system is significant for building the world. In this regard, the purpose of the study is to describe the lexical-thematic group "Names of socio-political organizations" in George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" and to identify productive elements for creating the vocabulary of this group. The paper uses the descriptive method used in the onomasiological approach. As a result of the research, the units that make up the lexical-thematic group "Names of socio-political organizations" were selected, productive elements for creating the studied names were identified, and their lexical meaning was characterized. It can also be concluded that the text of a dystopia is the space in which the author's imagination is realized when creating a non-existent world. This world is not a copy of objective reality. At the same time, the naming of fragments of the new reality is based on the knowledge contained in the mind of the author.

On Empty Names: Russell’s Theory and His Rivals

Talking about non-existent beings is a great and important constituting part in ordinary languages. However, it is not as easy to make a judgement about whether a statement involving non-existent terms is true or false. Many philosophers gave their own solutions on this issue and one of the most famous theories was brought up by Russell. This article discusses several of the most prominent theories of non-existent things, centered on Russell's theory of definite descriptions. Some of vital objections to Russell would also be demonstrated. The choice of solution is very significant since it could affect not only analysis of ordinary languages but also a variety of other issues.

Sporadic adult-onset neuronal intranuclear inclusion disease without high-intensity signal on DWI and T2WI: a case report

BackgroundNeuronal intranuclear inclusion disease (NIID) is a rare neurodegenerative disease characterized by eosinophilic hyaline intranuclear inclusions in cells in the central and peripheral nervous system. High-intensity signal in the corticomedullary junction on diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is supportive to the diagnosis of NIID. We describe a patient with sporadic adult-onset NIID but without any high-intensity signal on DWI and T2-weighted imaging (T2WI).Case presentationA 58-year-old woman without special family history developed mild persistent tremor in the right hand and deteriorated 2 years later. At 60 years of age, the patient began to conceive the bank, police and internet being deceptive, further presented apathy and confusion after two and a half years, as well as fabrication of non-existent things. Despite the treatment of antipsychotic drugs due to a diagnosis of mental disorder, the patient appeared weakness in the right limbs. Neurological examination revealed mutism, resting tremor, cogwheel-like rigidity in upper limbs, and weakness in all limbs. Brain magnetic resonance imaging displayed no cerebral atrophy initially but atrophy of frontal, temporal and parietal lobes 5 years later. No any high-intensity signal on DWI and T2WI was revealed. However, hypometabolism in the cortexes with atrophy and the right putamen nucleus were showed on 18F-fluoro-deoxy-glucose positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance. On the basis of 107 GGC repeats (normal number <40) in NOTCH2NLC gene and intranuclear inclusions with p62 immunoreactivity in the adipocyte of cutaneous sweat duct by skin biopsy, NIID was finally diagnosed. The symptomatic treatment was given but the patient had no evident improvement.ConclusionsOur case highlights that despite the lack of high-intensity signal on DWI and T2WI, NIID is still considered for patients with parkinsonism and mental impairment.

Hiszpański biskup Izydor z Sewilli i jego Etymologie o mitologii antycznej Grecji i Rzymu

Saint Isidore of Seville, the Spanish bishop and the Doctor of the Church was one of the most productive writers. Etymologiarum libri XX is the most important and the best known work written by him. In this monumental encyclopaedia he includes information from all the fields of science, humanities and culture, passing the knowledge coming from the antiquity and giving it to the people of the Middle Ages. The author of the article tries to explain, in what way the most read encyclopaedia of the Early Middle Ages presents the issue of gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. Isidore mentions the most important pagan gods and mythical monsters in his work. He does not reject ancient mythology but he treats it only as stories, fairy tales describing unreal non-existent things that are the work of literary fantasy.

Samian Meontology. On Melissus, Non-Being, and Self-Refutation

It is traditionally – and with reason – attributed to Melissus an absolute kind of monism, which we do not even recognize in his alleged master, Parmenides. For Melissus, there is only a unique, infinite, eternal, homogeneous and unchangeable entity. On this point, there is an almost unanimous consensus among scholars. This implies that nothing else exists except this one entity, and therefore that our physical world, the objects of our experiences, do not exist. Everything we know and talk about is not real. There are some passages in Melissus’ fragments that make this anti-Parmenidean consequence explicit. This means that monistic ontology generates, like a shadow, a vast ‘meontology’ that surrounds every human naturalistic discourse, every theory about the world and therefore every possible object of knowledge (except for one). This, however, hides a problem of no small importance: among the non-existent things assumed by this doctrine there are, indeed, even the humans, and so the philosopher himself, Melissus, and his book, and any human thought or speech. This would seem to make Melissus’ doctrine self-refuting, denied by the very existence of the doctrine itself and of the one who proposes it, as well as by the experience of those who learn it. The difficulties inherent in strict monism have led not only to reassume the traditional critical judgments on Melissus’ philosophy (dating back at least to Aristotle) but also, in recent times, to believe that he was not a serious philosopher, rather an eristic thinker. In this essay, I propose to examine the dark side of Melissean ontology, his discourse on non-being, and to demonstrate not only how his doctrine – in Melissus’ perspective – could escape the risk of self-refutation, but also that there is no compelling evidence that proves he should not be taken seriously.

The Impact of Navya-Ny\u0101ya on M\u0101dhva Ved\u0101nta: Vy\u0101sat\u012brtha and the Problem of Empty Terms

In this article, I explore the encounter of the Mādhva philosopher Vyāsatīrtha with the works of the Navya-Naiyāyika Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya. The article is based on original translations of passages from Vyāsatīrtha’s Nyāyāmr̥ta and Tarkatāṇḍava. Philosophically, the article focuses on the issue of empty-terms/nonexistent entities, particularly in the context of the theory of inference. I begin by outlining the origin of the Mādhva and Nyāya positions about these issues in their respective analyses of perceptual illusion. I then contrast the role of Gaṅgeśa’s thought in the Nyāyāmr̥ta and Tarkatāṇḍava and show how Vyāsatīrtha responds to Gaṅgeśa’s ideas in different ways in those texts. I conclude with a discussion of how Vyāsatīrtha defends the Mādhva theory of “substrate-free” qualities against Gaṅgeśa in order to show that we can think and make valid inferences about nonexistent things.

Non-existent Things as Subject of Inference in Bhāviveka’s Dacheng Zhangzhen Lun

This paper is a preliminary study of Bhāviveka’s Svātantrika-Mādhyamika justifications for taking non-existent things as the subject (pakṣa) of an inference, based on his Dacheng Zhangzhen Lun (*Karatalaratna). Bhāviveka’s treatment of inference is similar to that of Dignāga in that the subject is required to be existent. Bhāviveka also holds that, in a conventional sense, words refer to universals and to the existent entities that possess them, while the two are cognised together. However, in his inference for the unreality of unconditioned things, he likens these things (the subject) to a sky-flower (the example, dṛṣṭānta) that never arises and is unreal even conventionally. This paper first demonstrates how taking unconditioned things (being non-existent) as the subject of an inference can be problematic for Bhāviveka. Then, it discusses Bhāviveka’s attempts to address the problems by subsuming the unconditioned things under the domain of conventional reality. The paper concludes that these attempts show his flexibility in terms of what is taken as conventionally real.

Does Separating Intentionality From Mental Representation Imply Radical Enactivism?

Traditionally, intentionality is regarded as that feature of all and only mental states – paradigmatically beliefs and desires – in virtue of which they are directed at or are about something. The problem of intentionality is to explain how it fits into the natural order given the intuition that no physical entity can be intentionally directed in this sense. The basic assumption of this paper, proposed by enactivists, is that failure to naturalize intentionality and mental representation is partly due to the fact that most participants in the debate take intentionality and mental representation to be equivalent. In contrast, it is proposed to treat intentionality as a feature of whole embodied agents (paradigmatically organisms) who can be directed at objects and states of affairs in various ways, while representation should be regarded as a feature of mental states (and their respective vehicles or underlying mechanisms). The present paper develops and motivates the distinction, applies it to Metzinger’s project of naturalizing phenomenal representation, and demonstrates the range of theoretical options with respect to a delineation of cognition given the enactive proposal. It is taken as problematic that enactivism takes the realm of cognition to be identical to the realm of biology. Instead, a constraint on a theory of intentionality and representation is that it should delineate the subject matter of cognitive science and distinguish it from other sciences, also to leave room for the possibility of artificial intelligence. One important implication of the present proposal is that there can be creatures which can be intentionally directed without having the capacity to represent. That is, their intentionality is restricted to being able to be directed at existent things. Only creatures in possession of the right kind of neurocognitive architecture can produce and sustain representations in order to be directed at non-existent things. It is sketched how this approach conceives of intentionality as a developmental and layered concept, allowing for a hierarchical model of varieties of intentionality, ranging from the basic pursuit of local environmental goals to thoughts about fictional objects.

The Role of Existential Quantification in Scientific Realism

AbstractScientific realism holds that the terms in our scientific theories refer and that we should believe in their existence. This presupposes a certain understanding of quantification, namely that it is ontologically committing, which I challenge in this paper. I argue that the ontological loading of the quantifiers is smuggled in through restricting the domains of quantification, without which it is clear to see that quantifiers are ontologically neutral. Once we remove domain restrictions, domains of quantification can include non-existent things, as they do in scientific theorizing. Scientific realism would therefore require redefining without presupposing a view of ontologically committing quantification.

Spinoza on Fictitious Ideas and Possible Entities

The aim of this article is twofold: to provide a valid account of Spinoza’s theory of fictitious ideas, and to demonstrate its coherency with the overall modal metaphysics underpinning his philosophical system. According to Leibniz, in fact, the existence of romances and novels would be sufficient to demonstrate, against Spinoza’s necessitarianism, that possible entities exist and are intelligible, and that many other worlds different from ours could have existed in its place. I argue that Spinoza does not actually need to resort to the notion of possible entities in order to explain the incontrovertible existence of fictions and fictitious ideas. In order to demonstrate this, I will first show how, according to Spinoza, true ideas of nonexistent things need not be regarded as fictitious ideas. Then I will show by which means Spinoza can justify the real existence of fictions and fictitious ideas in the human mind through our present knowledge of actually existing things, to conclude that fictitious ideas neither add anything to what we already know of things, nor do they increase the extent of the existing conceivable reality by demanding the existence of possible non-actualised entities.

Aristotle's Correspondence Theory of Truth and What Does Not Exist

While nowhere does he use the term to refer to his own theory, Aristotle is often thought to exemplify an early correspondence theory of truth. In the paper, I examine the textual evidence used to support the idea that Aristotle holds a correspondence theory of truth, and to infer the nuances of this theory. I hold that Aristotle’s theory of truth can account for terms that signify non-existent things, i.e., that on Aristotle’s account, an assertion is not automatically false given its subject term’s “failure to refer”. Terms do not refer for Aristotle, they signify (and his use of the concept of signification extends far beyond linguistic reference).

Aspects of Patristic Cosmology

GIVEN THE WEALTH of cosmological and metaphysical insights emanating classical Hellenic philosophy, notably with the PreSocratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists, it was inevitable (and, one might add, providential) that the early Christian theologians (known generically in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions as the Church Fathers), working to a large extent within the intellectual ambit of Hellenism, would employ aspects of that philosophical legacy in their exposition of Christian doctrine. This conceptual appropriation was further necessitated by the relative lack of cosmological content in the Christian scriptures, with the notable exception of the first chapter of Genesis. The most fundamental distinction in Patristic cosmology is that between the uncreated (Greek aktistou), which refers to God alone, and the created (Greek ktistou). In its turn the created universe consists of spiritual and material spheres, the former including the heavenly beings usually called angels. A major implication of the distinction between the uncreated and the created is that the human being, who is created, cannot by nature know God, the uncreated. (1) In the patristic understanding, God is the only source of the entire created order: visible and invisible, intelligible and sensible, rational and irrational, and formed and formless. Thus all things to a greater or lesser extent reflect an aspect of the Godhead. (2) I will proceed to sketch salient aspects of the patristic cosmology in both the Greek and Latin traditions. Creation Nothing An axiomatic concept in Christian theology is the doctrine of God's creation nothing (Latin creatio ex nihilo), although this is not explicitly taught in the Judaic and Christian scriptures. Instead, in the Genesis account God is depicted as commanding chaos to develop into order. (3) However, the Platonist teaching that God creates the world of formless (ex amorphou hyles) is echoed in the apocryphal book, Wisdom of Solomon (II : 17). The first scriptural intimation concerning creation out of nothing is found in the apocryphal book Second Maccabees (7:28), as interpreted by Origen in his Commentary on John. Referring to the heaven and the earth and all things therein, the text affirms that God made them from nonexistent things--(ex ouk onton). (4) According to the Hebrew scriptures, nothing can creation or God, for time and space are presupposed by the creation. This implies that before creation or outside God there is only the nothingness out of which he creates. (5) The New Testament is relatively silent on cosmology, except to declare that Christ is the Logos through whom God creates and sustains the cosmos (e.g., John 1:3, 10; Colossians 1:16-17). Paul does mention in his Letter to the Romans (4:17) that God calls into existence the things that do not exist (kalountos ta me onta os onta). Here the Apostle to the Gentiles indicates that the cause of the world is outside the world, with only the will of God making the world's being possible. (6) Or, stated in ontological terms, creation entails a movement non-being to being. Among the second-century Christian thinkers known as the Apologists, the Platonist notion that God creates out of formless matter was held by Justin Martyr. He found scriptural support for this in Genesis 1:1-2, in a reading that conforms to the Septuagint text. (7) Justin's younger contemporary Theophilus of Antioch moved closer to an affirmation of creatio ex nihilo. He taught that God made all things out of nothing and rejected the notion of uncreated, preexistent matter as in Hellenic philosophy. Instead, God first created (formless) matter and then fashioned the world it. (8) Similarly, in the Latin tradition both Tatian and Augustine subscribed to the notion of pre-existent matter, which was itself created by God. (9) Towards the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria argued that according to both Genesis and Plato's dialogue Timaeus God creates the world out of formless matter, which is initially in a state of relative non-being (me on) until God grants being to it. …

Reconfiguring historical colonial identity: a cartographic approach to El párroco de Niefang by Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng

For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and conscientious hi...

What is the Problem of Non-Existence?

It is widely held that there is a problem of talking about or otherwise representing things that not exist. But what exactly is this problem? This paper presents a formulation of the problem in terms of the conflict between the fact that there are truths about non-existent things and the fact that truths must be answerable to reality, how things are. Given this, the problem of singular negative existential statements is no longer the central or most difficult aspect of the problem of non-existence, despite what some philosophers say.

Allegóriától allegóriáig. Mantegna Assisiben

Abstract 1. Andrea Mantegna's painting known by the name Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (fig. 1) could not have been created without knowledge of three frescoes in the lower church of Assisi (figs 2–4). My arguments are not based on verbal but on visual sources. The former possibility is precluded by the lack of any written information on Mantegna's presence in Assisi. What is certain is that the Mantuan court painter was working in the chapel of pope Innocent VIII's Belvedere villa between June 1488 and the summer of 1490. It is hard to imagine that he did not visit Assisi's San Francesco basilica during this time, one of Christianity's main shrines of pilgrimage endowed with the promise of papal absolution. (Isabella d'Este is known to have been there in 1494.) Pallas – the second painting after Parnassus for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este in Mantua – was painted sometime between 1497 and 1502. The venue is the Garden of Virtues into which the Vices have intruded and they have imp...

Fiction and Fictionalism

What is a fictional character? Nothing, according to Mark Sainsbury. Yet it is true to say that there are fictional characters. How? Because there are fictions according to which there are specific individuals. And it can be true to say that Anna Karenina is more intelligent than Emma Bovary. How? Because the truth-value of the sentence is to be assessed under the (false) presupposition that there are such people as Emma and Anna. And it is true to say that Conan Doyle's novels represent Sherlock Holmes, that I have been thinking about Holmes, and that Holmes is a famous character. How? Because such sentences either involve, or can be explained in terms of, intensional verbs or operators, and intensional contexts do not require that something be the thing which is represented, or thought about, or regarded in such a way as to make it famous. Sainsbury offers these strategies as ways for an irrealist—somebody who denies that explaining the nature of fiction requires us to believe in objects which are the characters of fictions—to explain away certain sentences which appear to require exactly such objects to make them true. These irrealist explanations are designed to defuse certain motivations for realism: namely, the apparent commitments of certain sentences to an ontology of fictional characters. Sainsbury's arguments for the adequacy of irrealism are complemented by arguments for the inadequacy of realism, targeted at three major realist views: that fictional characters are abstract things (unlike you and me, who are concrete); that they are occupants of other possible worlds (unlike you and me, who live in the actual world); and that they are non-existent things (capable of being referred to and quantified over as we are, but nevertheless things of a different ontological status).

Gerard of Bologna and Hervaeus Natalis on the Intuition of Non-Existents

The following paper shows that prior to Ockham’s doctrine on the intuition of non-existents, two Parisian theologians (Gerard of Bologna, c. 1240/50-1317; Hervaeus Natalis, c. 1250/60-1323) had already developed, in opposition to Duns Scotus, their own theories on the possibility of having intuitive cognition of non-existent or absent things. The article uses the editions of the two theologians’ Quodlibeta prepared by the author.

Why “On Denoting”?

A recent trend in Russell scholarship has been towards the thesis that, contrary to his own recollections, Bertrand Russell really didn’t need the 1905 theory of descriptions to deflate an excessive ontology, because (1) there was no excessive ontology in The Principles of Mathematics, at least not one with golden mountains and the like, and so (2) Russell’s real motive, at least his main one, was not ontological but rather was to replace the incoherent sense-reference distinction on which the old theory of denoting depended. I want to gently dispute that thesis by showing that Russell’s old theory in Principles was ambivalent on ontic commitment to non-existent things and it could not give an adequate account of the central problem which Russell faced before “On Denoting”, viz. our apparent discourse—including our ability to make true and false propositions— about non-existent things. I also show briefly how the new theory solves the old problem.

Why "On Denoting"?

A recent trend in Russell scholarship has been towards the thesis that, contrary to his own recollections, Bertrand Russell really didn’t need the 1905 theory of descriptions to deflate an excessive ontology, because (1) there was no excessive ontology in The Principles of Mathematics, at least not one with golden mountains and the like, and so (2) Russell’s real motive, at least his main one, was not ontological but rather was to replace the incoherent sense–reference distinction on which the old theory of denoting depended. I want to gently dispute that thesis by showing that Russell’s old theory in the Principles was ambivalent on ontic commitment to non-existent things and it could not give an adequate account of the central problem which Russell faced before “On Denoting”, viz. our apparent discourse—including our ability to make true and false propositions—about non-existent things. I also show briefly how the new theory solves the old problem.

Vasubandhu's Illusion Argument and the Parasitism of Illusion upon Veridical Experience

Vasubandhu, an advocate of the idealist Yogācāra school of Buddhism, argues that the nonexistence of external objects can be inferred from the appearance of nonexistent things in perceptual illusion. The idealist view and the argument from illusion are criticized by proponents of the realist Nyāya school on the grounds that illusory experience is parasitic upon veridical experience. The parasitism objection successfully defeats Vasubandhu's argument from illusion but fails to decisively disprove the idealist view because it remains possible that each illusory experience gets its content from a previous illusory experience in an infinite chain.