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Instructor: Jim Pryor. This course meets W 1:00 – 3:30 p.m. in CW 213.

The seminar will explore metaphysical issues about fictions and illusions, and semantic issues about “empty” names and negative existential statements (“there are no unicorns,” “Sherlock Holmes never existed”). Questions we consider will include: How to understand statements made in a work of fiction: are all or any of them true? false? neither? What about claims “from the outside” about fictional characters or places or events, such as “Holmes lived into his seventies”? Do any such fictional entities exist? If so in what sense? How can we make sense of their not existing? How can we manage to think and talk in persisting and coordinated ways about the same fictional entities? Are answers to these questions dependent on a story’s being intentionally created (or treated) as fiction, and our contingent social institutions? What might be different when it comes to illusions that have no authors, and whose audiences may not recognize them as such?