The triangle in general or the man as such are general objects. These are objects that possess the properties common to all the individual objects in their range. Stanisław Leśniewski and Tadeusz Kotarbiński, two Polish philosophers and logicians belonging to the Lvov-Warsaw School, produced several proofs aiming to show that such objects are impossible because the principles that govern them lead to a contradiction. In this paper I first clarify the structure of their proofs. Then I suggest a way to (...) elude their conclusion. In order to do that I use two Meinongian distinctions: the distinction between complete and incomplete objects, on the one hand, and the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties, on the other hand. I claim first that general objects are incomplete objects, i.e. they do not satisfy the ontological principle of the excluded middle, and second that the principle that governs the relations between the properties of general objects and the properties of the individual objects in their range should be restricted to nuclear properties. (shrink)

In this paper, I will claim that fictional works apparently about utterly immigrant objects, i.e., real individuals imported in fiction from reality, are instead about fictional individuals that intentionally resemble those real individuals in a significant manner: fictional surrogates of such individuals. Since I also share the realists’ conviction that the remaining fictional works concern native characters, i.e., full-fledged fictional individuals that originate in fiction itself, I will here defend a hyperrealist position according to which fictional works only concern fictional (...) individuals. (shrink)

There is a list of desiderata that any good metaphysics of fictional entities should be able to fulfill. These desiderata are: 1) the nonexistence of fictional entities; 2) the causal inefficacy of suchentities;3)the incompleteness of such entities;4)the created character of such entities; 5) the actual possession by ficta of the narrated properties; 6) the unrevisable ascription to ficta of such properties; and 7) the necessary possession by ficta of such properties. (Im)possibilist metaphysics uncontroversially satisfy 1) and 2); Neo-Meinongian metaphysics satisfy (...) 1), 2), 3), 5), 6), and 7); artefactualist or creationist metaphysics uncontroversially satisfy 1), 2), 3), and 4). Another metaphysics is needed in order to satisfy all such desiderata. In this chapter Idevelop such a metaphysics, claiming that a Syncretistic metaphysics that combines Neo-Meinongianism with Artefactualism achieves this purpose. According to Syncretism, ficta are hybrid entities individuated in terms of both a certain makebelieve narrative process and the set of properties that one such narration mobilizes. Toward the end of the chapter I consider some possible criticisms to this approach: its non-intuitiveness; ficta’s unnecessary proliferation; and troubles with creationism of any sort. (shrink)