God, Existence, and Fictional Objects: The Case for Meinongian Theism 9781350061613, 9781350061644, 9781350061620

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God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

Also available from Bloomsbury Advances in Religion, Cognitive Science, and Experimental Philosophy, edited by Helen de Cruz and Ryan Nichols Evidentialism and the Will to Believe, by Scott F. Aikin Free Will and Epistemology, by Robert Lockie

God, Existence, and Fictional Objects The Case for Meinongian Theism John-Mark L. Miravalle

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © John-Mark L. Miravalle, 2019 John-Mark L. Miravalle has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Toby Way Cover image © Pegasus (engraving) by Odilon Redon (1840–1916)/ Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany/Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Miravalle, John-Mark L., 1982- author. Title: God, existence, and fictional objects: the case for Meinongian theism / by John-Mark L. Miravalle. Description: New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. | Includes bibliographical  references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018010115 (print) | LCCN 2018035300 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350061620 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350061637 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781350061613 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Ontology. | Nonexistent objects (Philosophy) | God. | Theism. | Fictions, Theory of. Classification: LCC BD331 (ebook) LCC BD331 .M57 2018 (print) | DDC 111—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010115 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-6161-3 PB: 978-1-3501-5951-8 ePDF: 978-1-3500-6162-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-6163-7 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction

1

Part One Things That Don’t Exist

5

1 2 3

7

Fictional Object Nominalism Fictional Object Realism Meinongianism

27 41

Part Two God’s Existence and Nonexistents

57

4 5

Contingency and Nonexistence Perfection and Divine Existence

59

Part Three Nonexistence and Creatures

91

6 7

93

Ex Nihilo and Nonexistence Infinite Existence and Countless Nonexistents

77

107

Part Four Providence and Freedom

123

8 9

125

Nonexistents and Middle Knowledge Evil as Nonexistence

141

Conclusion

157

Notes References Index

160 174 182

Acknowledgments Let me begin by thanking Colleen Coalter and Helen Saunders at Bloomsbury, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. I’d also like to thank Michael Hahn and Fr. Sebastian Walshe for being willing to talk through thomistic issues generally over the years and specifically Aquinas’s take on fictional objects. My Mount St. Mary’s colleagues Josh Hochschild and Thane Naberhaus were very generous with their time in reading over this manuscript and giving helpful feedback. Thanks to both of you. Thanks especially to Tikhon Pino for reading the manuscript, and for being willing to talk through basically any random thing for the past decade or so. There’s probably not an idea in my head that hasn’t been enriched by our hours of conversation. So thanks again. My kids didn’t directly contribute to this book, but I couldn’t leave them out. So, thanks to Pius, Cassian, Stella, Caeli, and Roman. I’m so glad you all exist. Jessica, my wife, has been unwaveringly supportive and patient as I’ve explored this topic over the last several years. She’s also donated a lot of time and effort to looking over my writing, even though, as she said early on, “I hate reading about meinongianism.” Thank you, Jessica, for everything. Finally, my thanks to my parents, Mark and Beth Miravalle, who gave of themselves so extravagantly in teaching me everything they possibly could. This book is dedicated to both of you.

Introduction

For classical theism, the fundamental relationship between God and finite things is creation. God making creatures, causing them to exist, is prior— both chronologically and metaphysically—to any revelation or redemption or sanctification. God brings things into existence: traditional theistic doctrine asserts that if God hadn’t made us we wouldn’t have existed, and if God so chose he could let us fall back into nonexistence by removing his sustaining power. Accordingly, as contingent beings we stand between two poles: God, the necessary existent, on the one side, and the nonexistence that is our native, default state on the other side. Yet although theologians occupy themselves a great deal with reflection on what it means to be—what it means for us to exist and for God to exist—they do not generally display the same interest in the nonexistence from which we have emerged. We acknowledge our humble origins in passing but rarely, if ever in theological writing, is there a sustained analysis on what it means not to exist. And yet celebrating our existence is a pretty hollow formality unless we can starkly contrast our good fortune as creatures with the very different fate of not existing. No one will be grateful for her large inheritance unless she is made to understand clearly what it means to be poor. So too, there is no way to appreciate the fundamental relationship between God and creatures unless we understand clearly what it means for something to be not real. Fortunately, the philosophical discussion regarding what it means “not to exist” has been carried on with admirable zest by the analytic tradition throughout the last century and into this one. The resources are available, consequently, for a thematic treatment of the role a rigorous account of nonexistence could play in metaphysical theism.

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God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

Among the competing accounts of nonexistence, I believe meinongianism to be of special interest to theology for at least two reasons. First, because no one has yet offered an extensive argument for a meinongian-theist merger, and so such an argument should elicit some interest from its originality alone. Second, because so many of the uncritical formulations of traditional theistic belief seem to imply meinongian presuppositions. Consider, for instance: “You should thank God for your very existence.” “God’s so powerful, he was able to create you out of nothing.” “God knew all about you before you even existed.” “Only God has to exist, the rest of us only exist because he wanted us to.”

The apparent meinongian implications become evident without much reflection: If I owe my existence to God, does that imply that I might have been a nonexistent if God had otherwise chosen? If God knew about me before I existed, does that imply that nonexistents can be known? If creation is good, does that imply that nonexistence is not as good? If God necessarily exists, and we don’t, does that imply that existence is a property that can be possessed essentially (as in God’s case) or nonessentially (as in the case of creatures)? I think the answer to all these questions is Yes, and I think too that simple meinongianism (the position that some things don’t exist even though they have identifiable properties) is the theory of nonexistence that best accommodates the metaphysical implications of traditional theism. Happily, I also believe that meinongianism is a compelling account of nonexistence on its own merits, and that it better reflects the relevant phenomena of experience and linguistic practice than the other available theoretical options. I have consequently devoted Part One of this book to a survey of the primary models employed by philosophers when engaging the issue of fictional objects (which I will use instead of “nonexistents” during the first part to avoid tendentious terminology). The first chapter looks at fictional object nominalism, which holds that fictional objects don’t exist at all, have no character, and that speech which seems to be about them is really obliquely about something else. The second chapter deals with various forms of fictional object realism, the group of theories that identify fictional objects as genuinely existing, although in certain unfamiliar or unintuitive ways. Finally, the third chapter introduces and argues for a simple form of meinongianism, and

Introduction

3

attempts to ease certain strong intuitions against the idea that a thing could be known or have properties when it doesn’t even exist. Part Two transitions into issues directly related to theism by looking at how meinongianism can buttress the cosmological and ontological arguments for God’s existence, which will be the topics of Chapters 4 and 5, respectively. I argue that the cosmological argument can’t ultimately get off the ground without meinongianism, since on any other model the question “Why does that exist?” requires no causal response. As to the ontological argument, I concur with a great deal of the scholarship in thinking that its soundness stands or falls with meinongian principles, although I will make the uncommon argument that they both stand together. Part Three looks at the nature of creation beginning with a reflection on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo in Chapter 6. The thrust of that chapter is that meinongian objects provide the needed diversity before creation to allow for the diversity after creation. Chapter 7 examines the relationship between divine existence and creaturely existence, and closes by providing a comparison and contrast between the infinite existence of God and the vast realm of nonexistents. Part Four deals with questions of divine providence and free will. Chapter 8 considers the molinist conception of divine providence and argues that nonexistents provide the proper subject matter of the knowledge God has before selecting a providential program. Chapter 9 looks at the privation account of evil, particularly with regard to the evil of personal sin. Privation as a whole is a fitting topic for meinongian reflection, and I think it is easier to understand the personal resistance to God’s grace by individual creatures when we think of them as having a complete personal character in their nonexisting state. This isn’t a long book, but as can be seen from the foregoing, I have opted to address a good number of nuanced and sometimes highly controversial issues. Why such an ambitious range of topics? Because the goal of the book is to show the different areas in which adoption of meinongian principles might be advantageous to philosophical theism. This is a first volume on the subject, and one of its chief objectives is to suggest various directions in which the idea of meinongian theism might be developed. There is consequently a survey aspect to the project, and exhibiting the richness of the concept is in some

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God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

ways more important than convincing every reader of the soundness of every argument—which never happens anyway. Consequently, it would be, I think, missing an opportunity to shy away from areas of high interest simply because they also happen to be areas of high controversy. To conclude the introduction, I would like to frame what follows with a distinction borrowed (I think) from John Updike between points and purposes. My point, or my thesis, is that meinongianism is a great aid in clarifying theistic claims and rendering them coherent, and that this aid is significantly enhanced by meinongianism’s intrinsic plausibility. My purpose in writing this little book is to heighten our gratitude to God by properly appreciating the nonexistence out of which divine generosity has lifted us.

Part One

Things That Don’t Exist

1

Fictional Object Nominalism

The notion of objects that I want to defend both for its own plausibility and for the good work it can do in theistic philosophy is, as already stated, a basically meinongian position. That is, I believe something can be a legitimate object, a legitimate something in possession of properties, even though it doesn’t exist. This is because I think the criterion for thinghood is whether the candidate in question can be ascribed a property truly. Since it seems to me that there are good reasons to maintain that things which don’t exist can be truly said to have certain properties, it also seems to me that some nonexistents qualify as genuine things. However, at first sight such a position seems quite counterintuitive. After all, how can a unicorn have properties like a horn and four hooves if it doesn’t even exist? How can we talk or think truly about a unicorn that’s not even there to be spoken or thought of? These questions reflect the baseline intuitions driving the attitude toward fictional objects that we will first consider. The premise here is that if a thing doesn’t exist and if it can’t even manage to be in general, then it can’t manage to be in any specific or particular way—it can’t be an individual thing with a given set of features, and it can’t be a fit object for human speech or intentional attitudes. If it doesn’t exist, then it can’t be at all. Clear enough on the surface, but the model has its work cut out for it, since it has to show that sentences which seem to be true and seem to be about fictional objects are either untrue or not about fictional objects at all. In practice, this means that the propositions “A unicorn is a horse with a horn,” “Unicorns don’t exist,” “Unicorns were first described by the ancients,”1 and “I wish I could ride a unicorn” must in each case either be false or have nothing whatsoever to do with unicorns.

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God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

Since this approach treats speech that is apparently about fictional objects as not actually being about such objects at all, it has been dubbed the nominalist approach, a usage I will employ here. Now the initial attempt to make this nominalist case regarding the nonexistent occurred in the early part of the twentieth century, and was representatively articulated by Betrand Russell (and was, as is well-known, deeply indebted to Frege). A more recent and very influential school of thought has been founded by Kendall Walton, and goes by the moniker of pretense theory. Finally, I want to discuss the somewhat radical nominalism of Jody Azzouni on this issue, as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of where fictional object nominalism eventually ends up.

Russell, descriptions, and second-order predicates To grasp Russell’s thought about fictional terms like “unicorn” or fictional phrases like “the golden mountain,”2 we first have to spend some time looking at the central features of his thought regarding particular things. A particular is an individual with which one is directly acquainted—Russell gives the example of a mark on the blackboard, something we encounter directly through the senses (Russell 1956: 200). Also, one can vouch for the mark’s continuity as long as one’s direct experience of it is uninterrupted. If we use a name while encountering such an object, we are actually referring to one, distinct thing. When I see my brother, and hail him as “Michael,” I am using a genuine name to refer to this particular individual. If I am asked, while Michael is present, what I mean by “Michael,” I can use an ostensive gesture (point or nod in my brother’s direction) and say, “I mean this man. Him.” Often, of course, we use names of individuals with whom we’re not acquainted, and it is then that the theory of names as disguised descriptions comes into play. In such cases, according to Russell, we are not referring to a concrete, individual thing, but are rather making general statements that fall under the category “propositional functions.” Propositional functions, in turn, do not single out a particular, but instead affirm that some (or all or no) particulars have certain attributes. When I say “Some horses are brown,” I mean “Some x [meaning one or more particulars] is a horse and is brown.” When I say “Nothing lasts forever,” I mean “Every x [meaning every particular] does not last forever.”

Fictional Object Nominalism

9

Furthermore, when I say, “Walter Scott was a fine writer,” since I haven’t met Walter Scott and since he’s not here now, I obviously don’t mean “This man was a fine writer,” or “He was a fine writer.” I’m not acquainted with Walter Scott as an individual, which for Russell means my use of his name doesn’t actually refer to an individual man in all his particularity. “Walter Scott” is for me a shorthand way of saying “the author of Ivanhoe and various other novels,” since that’s about all I know of Walter Scott. Consequently, what I mean when I say “Walter Scott was a fine writer” is something along the lines of “One and only one x was the author of Ivanhoe and various other novels and was a fine writer.” Finally, before getting to the topic of nonexistence, it must be clearly understood that propositional functions, including the use of descriptive (as opposed to denoting) names, do not in themselves affirm anything of a particular individual. We can, according to Russell, say that some men live in Timbuctoo, even though we don’t know any such men, because our general affirmation doesn’t require any direct reference to a particular individual, a reference that would demand immediate acquaintance with him. We can say that some tiger made a certain pawprint, even though we have no idea which one, because we aren’t talking about a particular tiger.3 We aren’t referencing particulars at all, but only using the blank variable “x” that may, depending on the case, be satisfied by one or several or all or no particulars. Now we turn to existence-language, which for Russell operates at the propositional function tier and is to be employed as a second-level predicate, not singling out particulars, but describing various values of “x.” The word “exists” in all its forms, positive and negative, is unable to pick out singulars, and instead confines itself, when kept within proper bounds, to the general. Again, we know Timbuctoo-dwellers exist, even though we don’t know any of them personally, and we would affirm that tigers exist even if we don’t know any by name. With this system in place, Russell thinks all our talk about socalled nonexisting things can be retranslated so as to (a) avoid attributing features to nonexistents and (b) make it clear that our thought and speech are never in fact directed at nonexisting things. The idea is to use this system in paraphrasing basic statements involving fictions. Thus, “Unicorns don’t exist” may be rendered, “Every x is not a horse with a horn.”

10

God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

“A unicorn is a horse with a horn” may be rendered, “For every x, x is a unicorn iff x is a horse and has a horn.” “Unicorns were first described by the ancients” may be rendered, “The ancients were the first to say that for every x, x is a unicorn iff x is a horse and has a horn.” “I wish I could ride a unicorn” may be rendered, “I wish some x were a horse and had a horn, and that I could ride that x.”

This system appears to allow us everything we wish to say, and lets the nominalists dismiss nonexistents, their properties, and all talk or thought about them. Everything hangs, though, on this disparity which is claimed to obtain between existence at the level of propositional functions and particularity at the level of immediate encounter. For Russell, existence must not be conceived as a property ascribed to some things and not to others; it is simply a locution for ascribing various other properties to things at a non-specific level.4 It’s important to recognize the correlation in Russell’s theory between the illegitimacy of both existing and nonexisting particular objects. If some particular things had existence, it might imply that other particular things didn’t. And if those other particular things didn’t have existence, it would wreck Russell’s whole program. If something is a particular thing, it must presumably have some properties, and in that case there wouldn’t seem to be any legitimate reason to proscribe talking about it. So “exists” can’t characterize individuals, either positively or negatively. In practice, this means you can’t meaningfully say that a given particular exists or doesn’t exist (Russell 1973: 164–165). I can’t use “exists” with the word “this” or “that,” since these latter words denote a concrete, present thing (Russell 1957: 227). I also can’t use “exists” with genuine names (Russell 1956: 243). It would be a grammatical error to point to my brother and say, “Michael exists,” a category mistake that would confuse the general and the particular. I can, though, use a name as a description and use “exists” or “doesn’t exist” in connection with it. I can say that Sherlock Holmes never existed, as long as what’s clearly meant is something to the effect that no x is a detective living at Baker St. in London called Sherlock Holmes who played violin. I can also say with perfect propriety, “I’m telling you, Michael exists,” as shorthand for, “One, and only one, x is my brother and is named Michael.” All this, at first sight, seems to accord perfectly well with our standard language usage (wouldn’t it

Fictional Object Nominalism

11

be ludicrously redundant to point to something that’s plainly there and say, “That exists!”?), and it seems to tie off any loose ends to Russell’s theory. So much then for the approach to fictional objects which in its day held enormous sway over the analytic movement.5 Why then has Russell’s strategy lately fallen out of favor? We can begin with the theory of names as disguised descriptions. Since Kripke at least it has been widely doubted that this is in fact how names really function. When I say “Michael” at a distance, I mean the same thing as when I say “Michael” while my brother is present in the room. I mean an individual, particular man in both cases. What I certainly do not mean by “Michael,” and what I do not believe constitutes Michael, is the assortment of features I or anyone else associate with him at a given time. I am not describing; I am denoting. There is, in fact, a profound continuity of meaning and reference in my use of “Michael” when he is present and when he is absent. Therefore, if I am permitted to say “My brother Michael exists,” when he’s not around, why may I not say when he’s in the room, “This man, right here, is my brother, Michael. I told you he exists”? The same seems to be the case with fictional objects. Sherlock Holmes does not appear to be reducible to the attributes we typically associate with him. “Sherlock Holmes” is not a disguised description that inherently connotes brilliance or crime-solving or violin-playing. In fact, in the 1988 film Without a Clue, Holmes is meaningfully depicted without any of these attributes—in that movie he’s portrayed as a witless buffoon who couldn’t solve a crime if his life depended on it. But if by “Sherlock Holmes” we do not mean a certain collection of associated attributes, what can we signify by the name except a particular individual? And if Sherlock Holmes is a particular individual, then Russell’s theory is badly weakened, since in that case it wouldn’t be true to say that no x is Sherlock Holmes. And using the same paradigm, it wouldn’t be true to say that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist. Which consequence would of course be dead contrary to what Russell wants to argue. The controversy over names as disguised descriptions, whether for real or fictional objects, is a busy discussion with a lot of voices that could take us pretty far afield and isn’t central to my critique of Russell in any case. Before getting to my main critique, though, I want to bring up one more point that will resurface later in greater depth, and that’s the psychological data regarding

12

God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

our speech about fictional objects. On Russell’s view, whenever we supposedly talk about nonexisting things, what we’re actually talking about is existing things, and what properties they have or don’t have. But initially, at least, that doesn’t ring true. When I say “Unicorns don’t exist,” I’m not thinking of all the things in the universe, and asserting in one fell swoop that none of them are both horses and horned. I’m thinking of a horned horse, and how there aren’t any of them. When I say “Unicorns are horned horses,” I’m not mentally adding a conditional, “I mean, if anything was a unicorn, it’d be a horned horse” any more than when I say “Vixens are female foxes” I follow it up with “That is, if anything is a vixen.”6 What I’m doing, mentally at any rate, when I talk about unicorns and griffins—and vixens—is fixing on an image of the animal in question. Imagination, at least, seems to indicate that my intentional object is the fictional thing itself. But again, we’ll return to this aspect of the problem in greater detail later on. Now for the chief problem with Russell’s account. As we’ve seen, the stipulation is that “exists” and “doesn’t exist” can only operate in propositional functions, and propositional functions can only describe variables that can only be satisfied by particulars—which in turn can’t be characterized by “exists” or “doesn’t exist.” This network of linguistic regulations is severely unnatural. We can say that men exist, but we can’t say that this man before me exists? Isn’t it precisely the existence of this man before me and all the others like him that makes it true in the first place to say that men exist? To reuse the example of my brother once more: suppose I am telling a skeptical friend that I really do have two brothers, Michael and Joseph, who aren’t fictional but truly exist. Then my brothers walk through the door together, and I point to them, and I say, “You see, these are my brothers, Michael and Joseph. I told you they exist.” It seems self-evident that my speech-act in this case is perfectly legitimate, and more to the point that the existence of these particular men, with genuine names, is precisely what is required if my general claim about the existence of two brothers is to be true. Perhaps Russell would claim that it is not the existence of my brothers, but the particularity of my brothers that allows for the truth of the general claim about their existence. Similarly, Donald C. Williams (1962: 762) proposed that we could dispense with the language of existence for individuals and replace it with the language of being-in-the-universe, or, presumably, being in the real

Fictional Object Nominalism

13

world. Peter van Inwagen (2009b: 479 fn. 12) talks about individual things having the distinction of being able to be “labeled.” These words and phrases express, supposedly, the character of concrete things which is decidedly not existence, but makes it possible to speak of existence at the general level. But where else do we make such a radical verbal distinction between the character of things at the general level and the character of the particular things that makes the general situation what it is? It’s the fact that particular, individual (“those”) flamingoes are pink which makes it true to say that some flamingoes are pink. Imagine a zoologist who decreed it faulty grammar to call a concrete flamingo pink, but allowed that some flamingoes are, as a general rule, indeed pink. Imagine, to make the parody more ludicrous but the parity more precise, that this zoologist admitted that the color of the concrete flamingoes was what conferred truth on the general statement about flamingoes regularly being pink, but demanded that the color of the concrete flamingoes of immediate experience be given a different term altogether. The colleagues of our eccentric zoologist would surely point out to him that no matter what term he chose for the color of the particular flamingoes before him, that term would simply function as a synonym for what everyone knew was pink—a pinkness, moreover, which is basis for declaring truthfully that some flamingoes are pink. The same applies here. The philosophers who talk about concrete individuals not existing, but rather “being in the world” or “being labelable” or “being particular” or “being able to be encountered” or “being susceptible of acquaintance” are merely using more or less (and usually less) felicitous synonyms for existence. “Flamingoes are pink” is true only in virtue of individual pink flamingoes. So too, “Men exist” is only true in virtue of individual existing men.7 There’s no point in establishing a disassociation in terminology when the continuity between the particular and the general is so patent. Particularity, which according to Russell provides the criterion for the truth and falsity of general existence-claims, is nothing other than the existence of concrete individuals. Russell, defining himself into a winning argument, conflates existing individuals and particulars and then declares that we only speak about particulars, whether directly at the level of first-level predication or indirectly at the level of propositional functions. In so doing, he has created a grammatical

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God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

imbalance, forcing all “exists” and “doesn’t exist” statements into the pose of referring to existing things (masquerading as existentially neutral particulars). When we restore equilibrium at the level of individual things, that is, when we acknowledge that some individuals exist, we find that Russell has given us no reason, and certainly no logical or grammatical reason, to suppose that our talk about fictional objects is anything other than talk about individual objects that don’t exist. Again, Russell’s intention was to get rid of nonexisting individuals by logically excising the existence of individuals as well. He allowed that some things are individuals—he would not allow that they were existing individuals. And yet Russell’s system requires existing individuals (redubbed “particulars”); and if existing individuals are legitimate, then we have, as yet, no logical grounds for rejecting nonexisting individuals as legitimate too. Consequently, when the grammar of a sentence suggests that we’re talking about nonexistents, Russell has given us no reason to think we’re talking about something else. Armed with this understanding, we can reexamine some paradigmatic examples of translated existential statements: “Unicorns do not exist” paraphrased as, “Every x is not a horse with a horn.”

The subject of the first sentence is “unicorns.” What logical or grammatical basis is there for declaring that nonexisting unicorns are not in fact the subject of the sentence? None, so far. And certainly there’s no experiential basis: I’m not thinking about every existing thing when I say “Unicorns don’t exist.” Consequently, although the paraphrase is true in expressing that no “x” (i.e., no existing individual) is a unicorn, the form of the proposition gives us no grounds for asserting that only existing individuals are the referents of the first sentence. “A unicorn is a horse with a horn” paraphrased as, “For every x, x is a unicorn iff x is a horse and has a horn.”

Here, the second sentence, so far from expressing the same truth as the former, actually expresses a biconditional proposition whose truth we could not recognize unless we recognized the truth of the original proposition it is supposed to translate. For how could we know that if there were a particular (i.e., real and present) horse with a horn it would be a unicorn, and not, say,

Fictional Object Nominalism

15

a chimera, unless we knew what a unicorn was and how it differed from a chimera in the first place? By the same token, the biconditional “For any x, x is a bat iff x is a flying rodent” presupposes the unconditional “A bat is a flying rodent.” This correspondence of grammatical form and truth aptness between propositions including fictional terms and those not including such terms is what undercuts the paraphrase strategy at every turn: for any attempted paraphrase substituted for propositions with fictional terms, there is a parallel paraphrase available for ordinary propositions of a similar structure.8 “Unicorns were first described by the ancients” paraphrased as, “The ancients were the first to say that for every x, x is a unicorn iff x is a horse and has a horn.”

We must advert yet again to the fact that “x” is in practice used by Russell as a variable that can only be satisfied by an existing individual, in which case the paraphrase is grossly inadequate. The first sentence does not seem to imply, let alone expressly state, that the ancients, some of them, went about making biconditionals with false antecedents and consequents about real things. All it says is that they were the first to talk about unicorns. The translation seems to add quite a lot of meaning, which is a pretty clear indication that it’s not a good translation. “I wish I could ride a unicorn” paraphrased as, “I wish some x were a horse and had a horn, and that I could ride that x.”

Here the paraphrase strategy goes absolutely to pieces. How does someone wish that one of the existing things, one of the real-world particulars that can satisfy “x”—none of which are unicorns—actually be a unicorn? How does one go about wishing one kind of thing be another kind of thing? “I wish I could ride a unicorn” seems a simple, clear wish. “I wish a non-unicorn in the real world could be a unicorn” seems bizarre, if not incoherent.9 Clearly this translation doesn’t work either. To recap: the structure of our speech makes it look like we talk about things that exist as well as things that don’t exist. Russell attempted to provide paraphrases with a logical structure in which our speech no longer appears to reference either existing (particular) things or nonexisting (particular) things.

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God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

Since this attempt fails, we are left with the original evidence supplied by the irreducible structure of our thought and speech, which suggests that we can speak and think accurately about what exists and what doesn’t. If, said evidence to the contrary, it can be shown that fictional objects are not genuine objects, and that we don’t in fact think or speak about them, then such a conclusion will have to be reached by methods other than paraphrasing.

Walton, make-believe, and pretense theory In lieu of trying to tease out the sense of sentences seemingly directed toward fictional objects, many philosophers have decided instead to brand such talk a species of pretending, or make-believe. On this view, utterances that appear to be assertions about unicorns are in fact not assertions at all, or at least not assertions whose content can be extrapolated simply from the structure of the utterances themselves. Since Kendall Walton’s work in this area has enjoyed such influence, we may perhaps take his position as representative of the pretense-theoretical approach, if not in its details at least in its overall conceptual scheme.10 Again, a basic conviction of pretense theory is that fictional objects do not exist and do not possess properties. Thus, they are not the referents of fictional names (like “Sherlock Holmes”) or fictional descriptions (like “a winged horse”), and there is nothing we can truthfully say about them. What, then, are we doing when we say “Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral,” or when we say “There aren’t any winged horses”? Let’s look at how pretense theory attempts to handle three kinds of cases: the first is where we apparently describe a fictional object. Thus, “Winged horses are quadrupeds” or “Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral.” The second is where we compare one fictional object to another, or even compare a fictional object to objects in the real world. Thus, “Robinson Crusoe is more resourceful than Gulliver,” or “Sherlock Holmes is more famous than any other detective.” Finally, negative existential statements like “Winged horses don’t exist,” or “Tom Sawyer doesn’t exist.” So first, what do we mean when we say “Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral”? If “Tom Sawyer” doesn’t refer to anything, then we can’t really be

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making an assertion about Tom Sawyer. Instead, what the pretense theorist proposes is that in making such an utterance we are participating in a game of make-believe, a game begun by Mark Twain, and in this game sentences of this kind are (fictionally) true. Also, according to the rules of the same game, it’s pretended that the utterance “Tom Sawyer went in a spaceship to Neptune” is not true, so if you were playing the game in question such a sentence would be treated as false (Walton 1990: 398). A likely response to the utterance “Wasn’t Tom Sawyer the boy who went on a space journey?” would be “No, Tom Sawyer is the kid who tricked his friends into whitewashing the fence. Who are you thinking of?” Although Walton deals less with fictional kinds than fictional individuals, the same strategy may be applied to winged horses. When we say “Winged horses are quadrupeds,” we are participating in an old game (unwittingly) begun by the ancients according to which we pretend that utterances like “Some horses are winged” are true, and, by a kind of fictional logic (which we will discuss further presently), we would generally pretend that it is false to say “These winged horses were bipedal.” Moreover, in making these utterances, which include the words “Tom Sawyer” and “winged horses,” we are indicating that these sorts of pretend-assertions are appropriate—fictionally true— according to the standards of this game.11 Note that Walton does not suggest that we ever pretend that Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral, or that some horses are or were winged. Such a suggestion would bring back the fictional objects he is determined to demonstrate invalid and unnecessary, since in the case of such pretense we would be forced to admit that we pretended about Tom Sawyer, or that we devise make-believe games which include winged horses. In which case, of course, it would be true to say of Tom Sawyer that we pretended about him (thus making him a genuine object of some sort), and it would be equally true to say that winged horses are imagined by us and included in our games of make-believe. According to Walton, our pretense in these cases does not take fictional things as its object, but rather concerns the behaviors, and specifically the speech-acts, overseen by the rules of the particular game in force at the time. A further key notion for Walton is the idea of props, which are instruments which facilitate games of make-believe whether for children or adults. A prop

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God, Existence, and Fictional Objects

could be a boulder which one pretends is a person, a patch of paint on canvas which one pretends is a tree, or a bicycle which one pretends is a horse. What is pretended to be true in a game of make-believe will depend, then, on realworld facts about the props, for example, if Stella rides her bike faster than Regina then the pretense will be that “Stella’s horse is faster than Regina’s” is true. This gives rise to a further clarification: sometimes in make-believe games what one really cares about is the game itself, or as Walton says, the “content” of the game, where we care about what “happens” in the fiction (Walton 2000: 72–73). This is content-oriented make-believe, and is distinguished from prop-oriented make-believe, in which our primary concern is the real-world facts about the props. Thus, in the earlier example, when Stella says, “See, I told you my horse was faster than yours,” her thoughts and words and emotions center on being the fastest rider, or having the best bike. Understanding prop-oriented make-believe makes it more plausible to characterize literary criticism as generally a very sophisticated participation in official games of make-believe whose rules are determined by the relevant novels, which in turn function as props. No one can talk about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer without using the words “Tom Sawyer” in ways that according to pretense theory are not really true; thus, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a book about a boy named Tom Sawyer,” or “In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom tricks his friends into whitewashing a fence for him,” or even “Tom Sawyer is portrayed in Mark Twain’s novel as an irrepressible and irresistible young man.” These sentences are all structured so as to appear that the name “Tom Sawyer” is being used in a referential and attributive way, as though the speaker were talking about Tom and ascribing to him the properties of being-in-a-novel-world, or being-portrayed-by-an-author, etc. Thus, they are not true sentences, they are only pretend-true (or “fictionally true”), and again our reasons for pretending in their truth are based on the real facts about the real book written by Mark Twain. It is a truth about this book that the literature teacher is concerned to communicate when he utters the makebelieve assertion “Tom Sawyer is best friends with Huckleberry Finn.” Within this framework, we can expand our notion of a game to explain what occurs when one literary character is apparently compared to another, or when a literary character is compared to a real person. Let’s take the former

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first, with “Robinson Crusoe is more resourceful than Gulliver.” According to Walton, when we utter or appear to be arguing about this sentence, we are spontaneously creating a kind of unofficial game in which both the book by Daniel Defoe and the book by Jonathan Swift serve as the props, and again it is the real character of these props that determines which utterances will be treated as true and which will be treated as false. So too, we act as though “Sherlock Holmes is more famous than any real detective” is true because there is a degree of fame that no real person has, and when we are playing the Sherlock Holmes game we pretend that “Sherlock Holmes has that degree of fame” is true.12 Finally, what about negative existentials? How can we avoid the implication that we’re talking about Falstaff when we say “Falstaff doesn’t exist”? The answer, according to Walton, is to treat “exists” or “doesn’t exist” as a phrase used to indicate the gamut of reference-type speech-acts indicated by the preceding words and declare whether or not they successfully referred to anything. Such an utterance, then, consists of two distinct parts: the first part is uttering a word, and then the second part is declaring whether that kind of word utterance successfully refers to anything or not. So in the case of “Neptune exists,” the basic import would be “Neptune: That was successful,” whereas for “Falstaff doesn’t exist” we might understand something like “Falstaff: That didn’t work” (Walton 2000: 82). In the case of negative existentials, one is deliberately pretending to say something meaningful, and then immediately afterwards admitting that one did not, in fact, say something successfully referring to anything. This isn’t a mere use/mention distinction; the first part of a negative existential isn’t putting quotes around a word. “‘Tom Sawyer’ doesn’t refer” only provides information about two words, whereas “Tom Sawyer doesn’t exist” indicates that a whole raft of speech-acts—namely, all the “Tom Sawyer”type speech-acts—don’t refer. Thus, negative existentials entail using a word or phrase (like “Sherlock Holmes” or “winged horses”) with important cultural histories in a pretend way, and then acknowledging that trying to genuinely talk about something in this way fails.13 The upshot is that for Walton, fictional talk communicates truths (or errors) only about certain game-related behaviors—particularly utterances— and certain real-world objects. Fictional talk does not communicate anything about fictional objects, since there are no such objects and there is nothing to

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communicate about them. The problem, as I see it, is that for Walton as for any pretense theorist who rejects talk genuinely about fictional objects, there seems to be no basis for affirming any content to such discourse. Imagine, for instance, that I pretend, before a group of my friends, to have a conversation with my dog wherein I fill in the gaps in my pet’s barking noises by making barking noises of my own. Most of the elements of Walton’s theory can be included in this scenario; my utterances make covert realworld allusions (“Hey, doesn’t this sound like we’re actually talking?”), and I can make a gesture with my head or my hand inviting another friend to join in the game, the rules of which she can easily intuit. I may pretend, by nodding, that my dog has just made a true statement; shaking my head would indicate the opposite pretense. The dog’s barking provides what the novel provides in fictional pretense, namely, a non-referential prop. This game, then, seems to fulfill Walton’s characterization of fictional discourse, but it’s obvious, I hope, that my dog and I aren’t rising to the level of even inferior fictional discourse. Why? Because we’re not actually talking about anything, we’re not even having a conversation, whereas two people who talk intelligently about Sherlock Holmes or elves are having a conversation about something. What distinguishes so-called empty names or descriptions from mere nonsense sounds (like barking noises) is that we understand what the former express. Make-believe with the former is thus vastly different than make-believe with the latter: a child who says, “Let’s pretend our bicycles are unicorns” gets a very different response than a child who says, “Let’s pretend our bicycles are glurtches.” Why a different reception? Why a different experience? Not because in the first case the child is advocating adherence to speech-rules imposed by the unicorn-myth game, or because the child is making covert allusions to characteristics of ancient literature or heraldry. It’s quite simply because in the first case the children know what they are to imagine, and in the second case they don’t. If a group of children, without further verbal or tacit specification, pretend that their bikes are “glurtches,” they will in fact just use “glurtches” as a synonym for “bike.”14 If they pretend their bikes are unicorns (or horses), they will not use “unicorns” (or “horses”) as a synonym for “bike.” This is because “unicorn” conveys a certain content about the pretended objects themselves that “glurtches” does not.

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Walton, and pretense theory generally, is unable to account for this content. Because it denies any objects for the pretense to be about, it cannot explain why make-believe employing fictional names or descriptions is meaningful in ways that make-believe using nonsense words isn’t. In fact, although Walton distinguishes between prop-oriented fiction (where the focus is on the props) and content-oriented fiction (where the focus is on the content), he speaks very little about how the latter is even possible. Of course he acknowledges the fact of fictional imagining without props, as in the case of dreams, for instance (cf., Walton 1990: 43–51). Here, surely, fictional experience is focused on content. But in what can this content consist? Walton gives no clear answer. Surely such content does not consist in make-believe, nor in oblique allusion to real-world happenings. When I have a dream involving Sherlock Holmes, and upon waking I tell my wife, “I dreamt Sherlock Holmes came to our house for dinner,” I am not inviting her to play a game where certain sentences are pretendedly treated as true or false. I am also not trying to draw her attention to, say, the nocturnal neurological happenings responsible for my dream. I’m telling her what I dreamed, the content of my dream, and she understands what I dreamed because she knows to what “Sherlock Holmes” refers. Which, of course, means “Sherlock Holmes” doesn’t categorically fail to refer. Strong emotion toward fictional objects (particularly ones which are falsely supposed to be real) is another clear indicator of the failure of pretense theory. The boy afraid of the monster under his bed is not pretending, not makingbelieve. His fear is genuine—there’s simply no way to adequately characterize him as playing a game. He’s not afraid of nonsense words, and he’s not afraid of a word with a unique cultural history. The boy is afraid, but he’s not afraid of a word at all, and he’s not afraid of saying something unacceptable in a certain social context, and he’s not afraid of anything in the real world. He’s afraid of a monster, or the monster. With regard to negative existentials, it should cause concern when a very basic, very necessary component of verbal communication like “doesn’t exist” is declared self-undermining or flatly contradictory. Pretense theorists who categorically reject fictional objects end up instead characterizing true statements, like “Unicorns don’t exist” as an inherent inconsistency.15 To get these important truths across, one must, according to them, knowingly say

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something misleading by using a fictional name or description, and then correct one’s earlier statement.16 This can’t be satisfactory. We should harbor serious reluctance at embracing any model in which expressing truth entails disagreeing with oneself. As a final critique of pretense theory, it needs to be noted that the content, the objectivity, of fictional things is precisely what allows us to weave together various true statements, some of which involve fictions, into patterns of logical implication. It is true that Zeus is not Mickey Mouse, that the Greeks told stories involving the first but not the second, and that neither exists. Take the syllogism (adapted from Zalta 2000: 134): Zeus does not exist Zeus was petitioned by some ancient Greeks Some ancient Greeks petitioned what doesn’t exist

We may moreover include this conclusion as a premise in the following syllogism: To petition what doesn’t exist involves a mistaken judgment Some ancient Greeks petitioned what doesn’t exist Some ancient Greeks made a mistaken judgment

The middle term of the first syllogism is Zeus—take away the referential content of Zeus and there’s logically nothing holding this syllogism together. According to Walton, the second premise and conclusion are obliquely communicating content having to do with games and culture and props, while the first premise is initially pretending to refer to something with the word “Zeus,” and then acknowledging that trying to refer to something by saying “Zeus” in a referential-type-way fails. Put these pieces together and you don’t get a structure of logical entailment. The result is that Walton must call such a syllogism a pretend syllogism, where the first and second utterance don’t genuinely imply but only pretend-imply the third.17 But the syllogism is valid; if we knew the truth of the first and second premises, we would be rationally justified in reaching the (true) conclusion.18 Moreover, that conclusion, legitimately reached, provides further evidence for arriving at non-pretend truths about the world (e.g., that the ancient Greeks made an erroneous judgment) which include no reference to fictional names, fictional

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descriptions, or even “existence.”19 When the logic of sentences involving fictional objects validly implies truths which don’t involve fictional objects, it doesn’t work to give a blanket-characterization of all talk including fictional terms as make-believe.

Azzouni and radical nominalism A good place to conclude a survey of fictional object nominalism is recent work done by Jody Azzouni on the subject. The foregoing has indicated that both the structure of language and our basic experience tell us that thought and speech succeed in being directed toward fictional objects. We believe that the titular character of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a boy, not a girl, we have conversations about his Aunt Polly, and we imagine or dream or describe ourselves riding down the Mississippi with his friends Huck Finn and Jim. All of this seems to undermine the attraction of nominalism as an approach to fictional names and phrases. Not so, says Azzouni. Remarkably, Azzouni acknowledges that the structure of our thought and speech about fictional things is fundamentally indistinguishable from thought and speech about real things: “Empty singular thought is psychologically indistinguishable from singular thought in general. Correspondingly, empty singular sentences employ exactly the same parts of speech that are used by singular sentences” (Azzouni 2010: 46). Speaking of hallucinations, he says, “The subject matter of such an experience is the nonexistent items seen” (Azzouni 2010: 102). He is nonetheless steadfast in rejecting meinongianism and fictional object realism as alternatives, and clings to the conviction that fictional objects don’t exist and don’t have attributes. We don’t really talk about them, because they are nothing and you can’t talk about nothing. He claims to have “an unnoticed— and better—way to handle” the issue of fictional objects (Azzouni 2010: 49). What is that unnoticed and better way? As far as I can tell, it’s basically to ignore the data of language and experience: That we have to speak a certain way—and that we have to frame our semantic theories a certain way—simply says nothing about what our resulting ontological commitments must be. A metaphysical invocation of

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objects of any sort needn’t arise … Meinongians and realists, on the other hand, are guilty of a (admittedly subtle) non sequitur. No argument exists that takes us from the way that a verbal practice must be to either what there is or even to what that verbal practice commits its users to take there to be. By the way (and some philosophers will see how this point is related to the foregoing) the ontological argument doesn’t work either—even if existence is a predicate (Azzouni 2010: 158).

Leaving aside for now the casual and gratuitous slur on the ontological argument, which we’ll return to later, Azzouni’s argument seems to be that (a) our experience indicates we can think about fictional things (say, when we’re dreaming), (b) our language reflects this experience by being necessarily structured so as to make our talk about fictional things irreducible to our talk about existing things, and (c) we have no philosophical obligation to harmonize our theory with the facts of either thought or speech. No wonder his solution to the problem of fictional objects goes “unnoticed”! This kind of strategy for solving philosophical dilemmas would, if applied indiscriminately, undo philosophy entirely. A philosophical problem isn’t resolved by ignoring the facts which gave rise to half of the original paradox. What else do we have to go on in philosophical research besides how we experience things and how we talk about them? We presume there’s a basic mapping between our thoughts and words and the way things are; if there wasn’t there’d be no point in philosophers talking or thinking about the way things are in the first place. So when Azzouni tells us we necessarily experience fictional things a certain way, and talk about them a certain way, and at the same time that such thought and speech are not indicative of the way fictional things are, he’s opting out of a shared enterprise of bringing cogency to how we describe our fundamental experiences and the things those experiences are about. Philosophers are entitled to correct imprecisions when people speak misleadingly, corrections which should serve in the final analysis to give more exact expression to what people experience. Philosophers are moreover entitled to correct misconstruals or false judgments about experience, as long as these corrections are themselves ultimately vindicated by experience itself.20 But philosophers aren’t carrying out their proper function when they declare that we must think a certain way and feel a certain way and speak a

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certain way—that thinking, feeling, and speaking this way can’t be clarified or corrected—and that such thoughts, feelings, and language can be discounted when constructing a theory of how things are. The upshot is that if, as Azzouni believes and as seems to be the case, we can think about and feel about and talk about fictional objects in certain ways, then the proper conclusion is that fictional objects are genuine things.21 What kind of things? Existing or nonexisting? These are the options which we will now respectively review.

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Fictional Object Realism

There’s a strong instinct to accept the premise that if something has features, then it exists. Fictional object nominalism accepts the subjunctive and then, beginning with the nonexistence of fictional objects, follows modus tollens to conclude that fictional objects don’t have features. What we will call fictional object realism accepts the subjunctive, affirms that fictional objects have features that we discuss and think about freely and accurately, and concludes to the consequent: fictional objects exist.1 Again, the challenge here is self-evident: we’re all accustomed to saying that unicorns and Pegasus and Sherlock Holmes don’t exist, so the fictional realists are going to have to give an account of the existence of these things that can be reconciled to this ordinary conviction. Ultimately, the strategy will be to characterize fictional objects as being different kinds of things than we typically imagine them to be. What kind of things, then, are these (existing) fictional objects? We can loosely classify the fictional realists according to the following schema: (a) those who characterize fictional objects to be extramental entities in this world, (b) those who take fictional objects to be extramental entities in another world, (c) those who take fictional objects to be mental entities. The fictional realists of the first class represent a strong growth industry, with wide variations, but I will try to consolidate my treatment by focusing on van Inwagen’s (2003) fictional object theory since his discussion of the issue is both influential and (self-admittedly) vague. Since my critique of fictional object theory is quite general, dealing with a vague theory will help avoid getting bogged down in the different flavors of this approach. Those who see unicorns and Sherlock Holmes as being robust, complete but otherworldly entities cannot be better represented than by David Lewis

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(1986). Again, my critique of this position is very simple and so applicable, I think, to any variation on this attempt to model fictional objects. Finally, the notion that fictional objects exist as ideas is as old as common sense, and since it is so entrenched in our uncritical assumptions I’ll spend the most time on it. Also, since this position has so few contemporary defenders, and since the tendency of this book is ultimately a theological one, I’ll give Thomas Aquinas the role of spokesman for this approach to fictional objects. Doing so will hopefully benefit the discussion by strengthening the continuity between the non-theological and theological sections of the book, since Aquinas, as an authority concerned with both sets of issues, will figure prominently throughout as both a support and a foil for my views on God and nonexistents.

van Inwagen and object theory Since we talk and think about fictional objects, it’s natural to suppose that they exercise an influence over us—that is to say, a real influence over real people in the real world. A common trope in these discussions, already noted earlier, is that Sherlock Holmes is more famous than any non-fictional detective. But if fictional objects have a real impact on the real world, many would say it stands to reason that fictional objects have to be real—have to exist—themselves. The object theorist attempts to solve this puzzle by acknowledging that fictional objects exist, but then goes on to posit that fictional objects aren’t the things they’re said to be by the fictional works which present and describe them. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet is portrayed as being Danish, a prince, and sorely agitated at the death of his father. The object theorist proposes that there is a real Hamlet, but that he’s not Danish, not a prince, and has no father. What is he? There object theorists disagree. On some accounts, he’s an eternally existing immaterial object (Walterstorff 1980), or perhaps something like an abstract object, but an abstract object that’s somehow created by human artifice (Thomasson 1999; Salmon [1998] 2005a: 76–79; Kripke 2013: 73–74). Perhaps he’s a pattern of behavior begun by a novelist and then continued and expanded by a general culture (Zalta 2000: 138–140), or a “grammatical object” created by certain speech-acts (Crittenden 1991). Or maybe he belongs

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to his own class, the class of fictional objects which isn’t reducible, or at least needn’t be reduced, to other more familiar categories (van Inwagen 2003). The central components of the theory, however, are that fictional objects exist and that what’s said of them in fictional works—which includes the relating of myths or dreams or hallucinations—isn’t true. The line of thinking goes as follows: fictional objects exist, which is why it’s possible for them to be the subjects of thought and speech, and to influence our emotional life. So it’s true to say that people used to believe in and theorize about Vulcan, and that Pegasus continues to captivate the imagination of children. But since no planet in orbit between Mercury and the Sun exists, and since no winged horses exist, Vulcan can’t be a planet and Pegasus can’t be a winged horse. The consequence is that some things said of fictional objects are true simpliciter. It’s true that King Arthur exists, and that he’s the subject of numerous written and visual narratives. But it’s not the case that King Arthur is human, or that he ever wielded a sword called Excalibur. So it’s false to say that King Arthur pulled a sword from a stone.2 Obviously, though, the attributes of being a king and pulling a sword from a stone are associated with King Arthur in a way that, say, the property of being a horse and having wings isn’t. King Arthur is generally portrayed as having certain attributes, such that to say, “King Arthur is King of Camelot” wouldn’t be regarded as false in the same way that, “King Arthur is a winged horse” would be. To reflect this phenomenon, object theorists frequently introduce a verbal distinction between the way fictional objects actually are and the way they’re represented in fictional (or hallucinatory or mythical) contexts. Thus, for instance, Hamlet “has” the property of being a character in Shakespeare’s play, and he “holds” the property of being a prince (van Inwagen 2003); Pegasus is the subject of myth and he “encodes” the property of being a winged horse (Zalta 2000); Pierre Bezúkhov has the property of being written about by Tolstoy, and “incorporates” the property of being a nineteenth-century Russian aristocrat (Walterstorff 1980). The merits of object theory should therefore be evident: it allows fictional objects to be the subjects of thoughts and speech, to be portrayed and discussed in fictional discourse, and to be denied existence in the sense that the properties they’re portrayed with aren’t the properties they really possess. What are the drawbacks?

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We might tentatively suggest an initial drawback by observing that while object theory accounts for the nonexistence of unicorns, it seems to entail a commitment to the existence of unicorn properties. For, according to object theorists, a certain collection of properties is associated with each fictional object; thus, being equine and winged is associated with Pegasus. Even if we grant that Pegasus is not actually equine and winged, these are still the properties with which he’s portrayed in myth—they’re the properties he encodes or holds or incorporates or whatever. But now it seems that the same problem of nonexistence surfaces again, because we now have the conjunction of equine and winged being talked about and thought about and felt about. It’s hard enough to follow an object theorist in embracing the counterintuitive affirmation that Pegasus is real, even though he isn’t a horse and can’t fly, but the model grows more implausible when we notice that that we’re generally imagining and describing the conjoined properties being-a-horse and beingable-to-fly when we talk about Pegasus. It’s that conjunction of properties that’s responsible for Pegasus capturing the human imagination over the millennia, it’s that conjunction of properties that allows us to think about Pegasus, identify him, talk about him, and it’s that conjunction of properties that doesn’t exist. Or at least most people, I expect, would maintain that that conjunction of properties doesn’t exist. The man on the street would be quite content to affirm that if there’s no such thing as unicorns, then there’s no such thing as being-aunicorn. van Inwagen, however, is willing to dispute the point. His view is that although there are no such things as winged horses, the property of being-awinged-horse does exist, a view he supports by citing what we just pointed out, namely, that since we think and talk about the property in question when we ascribe it to something fictionally, it must exist. This seems to make for an awkward ontology. In the case of real, existing things, one has (a) a name (“Fido”), which (b) is used in denoting a dog, and (c) the ascription of the property being-a-dog. Thus, we can say that Fido exists, the dog exists, and the property of being-a-dog is truly ascribed to an existing dog named Fido. There’s a sort of easy harmony among the aspects of this phenomenon. On van Inwagen’s account, this alignment is distressingly absent when we come to fictional objects. In such a case we would have (a) a name (“Pegasus”), which (b) is used as if denoting a winged horse, and (c) the ascription of the property being-a-winged-horse. Yet now we have Pegasus

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existing, even though the winged horse doesn’t exist, while the property of beinga-winged-horse, although an existing property, is falsely ascribed to Pegasus. Worse than this, a consistent application of van Inwagen’s method makes his conclusion even less tenable. For if we may say that the property of beinga-winged-horse is legitimately (although falsely) applied to Pegasus, with the implication both that Pegasus exists and that the property (of being-a-wingedhorse) exists, then why may we not equally well say that the property of beingPegasus is applied to a winged horse, with the corresponding implication both that the property (of being-Pegasus) exists and that a winged horse exists? In which case the object theorist’s hope of respecting our conviction that winged horses don’t exist is disappointed. An object theorist might insist that “a winged horse” or “the winged horse” is used to denote an existing fictional object, just as object theorists claim “Pegasus” is. But surely if someone says she wishes winged horses existed, she doesn’t mean she’s hoping someone will convince her of the existence of the entities postulated by object theorists. Nor, as a matter of fact, does she mean that when she says she wishes Pegasus were real. Both “Pegasus” and “a winged horse” are used to identify something that isn’t real, and, if it were, would be utterly unlike the things which van Inwagen presents fictional objects as being. Finally, someone who says she wishes winged horses were real also does not mean that she wishes the property of being-a-winged-horse could be truly ascribed to something real. She’s not thinking about something real, or about real things generally, and wishing that one of them could be replaced by or transformed into or have always been a winged horse (which is what would be required if one of the existing things in the real world were to have the property being-a-winged-horse). Nor is there any reason to suppose she’s thinking about properties, or the truth-values of propositions involved in certain property-ascriptions. When she says she wishes winged horses existed, she has something else in mind.

David Lewis and modal realism I’ll deal with the “other worlds” approach to fictional objects with the greatest brevity, and that for two reasons. The first is that as far as I can tell it is a thoroughly consistent theory, so it’s harder to find a flaw in the logical fabric

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of it, and the second is that when examined wholesale the theory is so incongruous with our intuitions that very little needs to be said to show its lack of rational appeal. In short, the theory states that fictional objects, whether persons, places, properties, things, or events really exist in “possible worlds.” These possible worlds, while different from our “actual world,” possess the same ontological character as ours and as one another; they are all of a kind: “All worlds are on a par” (Lewis 1986: 93). We and everything we instinctively call real comprise a unique world, but the actual world is distinct only because of the distinctive assortment of items within it. Thus, we can say that everything exists, and is therefore there to be spoken of, to impact our consciousness and our emotional life. Unicorns exist in some universes, Sherlock Holmes exists in some universe, and the plots to murder Hitler were all successful in various worlds. No dilemma, then, for fictional objects or their features or even the adventures they undergo. The obvious problem is that we’re just about all convinced that Pegasus, the flying horse, doesn’t exist. Anywhere. Nor are there any physical, flesh-andblood unicorns existing in some other world exactly the way physical, fleshand-blood horses exist in our world. Unicorns don’t exist at all. A very plain way to show the difference has to do with the suitability of our emotional reactions to fictional things and existing things. It’s one thing to weep at the plight of a real person suffering in New Guinea, and something wholly different to weep—as Augustine did, to his own later chagrin—at the plight of Dido.3 Suppose that in both cases there’s nothing we can do or could have done to help the person, and suppose that in both cases there’s no way, other than hearing about it, that the misfortune affects us. What is the crucial difference that remains? It seems to me self-evident that the real person is worthy of our pity, and Dido isn’t. Dido isn’t real, she doesn’t matter. She never even existed, none of the things Virgil reports really happened to her. It may be that watching Dido’s story dramatically presented reminds us of real situations involving people who are worthy of pity (consider a woman in the theatre crying and saying, “It’s so true! That’s exactly what it feels like to be forsaken!”), but Dido herself doesn’t merit any of our tears. Parents don’t comfort their children, terrified at night of monsters, by saying, “Don’t worry, Dear, there aren’t any monsters under your bed. There

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are countless other monsters terrorizing countless other children, but those children aren’t your responsibility and there’s nothing you can do for them anyway.” Parents simply say, “There are no such things as monsters.” And there’s no such thing as a real, material Sherlock Holmes, unicorn, or King of Camelot. These things don’t exist; not in this world, not anywhere. This truth I take to be basic so I’m not going to argue for it further.

Aquinas and fictional objects as ideas The final option before getting to the meinongian alternative is the model of fictional objects which gets closest, as I see it, to the instinctive views of the man in the street. If you ask an average person what a unicorn is, she will tell you it is a horse with a single horn protruding from its forehead. If you ask whether it exists, she will answer no. If you press her and ask how she can talk about something, or define it, if it’s not even there to be spoken of or defined, she will probably say something along the lines of, “Well, I mean it does exist, but only as an idea.” I’ll enlist Thomas Aquinas as the chief philosophical representative of this view, for the reasons already given, and based on those same reasons I’ll do a little more exegesis on his position than I have on the others. The trouble is that many of the passages surrounding fictional objects in the thomistic corpus don’t immediately appear to harmonize easily. Take the disputed questions on truth. At one place in the text, Aquinas states that, “the act of even a human intellect can be extended to something that doesn’t even exist” (de Ver. 3.2, ad. 7).4 But in another place in the same work he claims that true thinking corresponds to an existing thing (de Ver. 1.2., ad. 1).5 When he talks about specific kinds of fictional objects, the apparent internal inconsistency resurfaces. For instance, a passage where Aquinas discusses our understanding of fictional objects as a propaedeutic to his argument for God’s existence: However, every essence or quiddity can be understood without it being the case that anything is understood about its existence. After all, I can understand what a man or a phoenix is, and nevertheless be ignorant as to whether either has existence in the natural world. (de Ent. et essent., 3)6

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Prima facie this passage seems to indicate that some essences enjoy existence, while others do not, and that either can be known as a legitimate kind of a thing. A phoenix is a creature with a definite set of features, as is a man; a very striking difference between the two, of course, is that one doesn’t exist and the other does. We recognize the difference between existing things and fictional things, and then wonder, “Why do men exist? Why aren’t they like phoenixes, which don’t?” The answer, according to Aquinas, is found in the essentially existing source of existence, whom we call God, and who freely chooses to create some things and not others. But we don’t want to wade into theological waters yet—we just want to establish that Thomas is appealing to our awareness of this very phenomenon— that some things exist while other things don’t. Aquinas’ phoenix is no isolated instance of Thomas speaking about intentionality toward fictional objects. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, for example, he admits that we can have opinions about nonexistents, or even desire them (Sent. metaph. 9.3).7 And of course this is a fairly intuitive position. We may, for instance, opine that in a fight, a chimera would defeat a dragon, and we may wistfully long to witness a mythical encounter of this sort. In another commentary on Aristotle (Expos. peri herm. 1.3), Thomas points out that it’s perfectly legitimate to talk about nonexisting things. After all, we do it all the time. But we run into a hermenutical snag when we come to a passage commenting on the Posterior Analytics: Necessarily, whoever knows what it is to be a man, or any other thing, knows that that thing exists. For since there is no quiddity or essence of that which does not exist, nothing can be known regarding what such a thing is … it is impossible to know what it is to be a goatstag, because there is no such thing in the natural world … in order to be cognizant of what it is requires that one be cognizant of the fact that it is, as has been said. (Expos. post. analytic. 2.2)8

And a little later on he adds, “And therefore it is manifest that to the extent that we are cognizant of the fact that something is, to that extent we are cognizant of what it is” (Expos. post. analytic. 2.2).9 What are we to make of this apparent discrepancy? In one place Thomas seems to say we can know a phoenix, and in another that we can’t know a

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goatstag; in the one that an essence can be known without implying its existence; in another that if you know an essence it can only be because it exists. Of course one could simply characterize the passages as mutually inconsistent. Or, to use a milder term often used to soften the occurrence of inconsistencies over time, the passages might be an indication of a “development” in his thinking. After all, the works from which the passages are taken are separated by more than a decade; surely Aquinas might have changed his mind about the knowability—or even the coherence—of a nonexistent essence. It could also be argued that the discussion on the goatstag comes from a commentary on Aristotle; perhaps here Aquinas is expressing Aristotle’s opinion, not his own. If such is the case, however, it would be a remarkable and quite an important departure by Aquinas from aristotelian principles on essence and existence, and it would be surprising that more hasn’t been made of it. The roots of Aquinas’ essence-existence distinction are a perennial subject of controversy, and surely such a stark departure from the Philosopher would have drawn attention. I think, though, that interpreting the passages as representing incompatible views is unnecessary since the passages can be reconciled fairly easily employing a basic principle which runs throughout the entire thomistic corpus: actus specificatur per obiectum (an act is specified by its object). If every other intentional state is specified by its object, why not those states directed toward what exists and what doesn’t? Thus, to review the relevant verbs of the aforementioned texts, while a fictional essence can be understood (intellegere), desired (concupiscere) and supposed (opinari), it cannot be properly said to be known (scire), nor can one be cognizant of it (cognoscere). In fact, this last term might fit better both with contemporary English and with the analytic tradition were it translated as “being acquainted with.” One can only “be acquainted with” something that exists. But in any case, the point is clear: different targets require different acts of apprehension and appetite to reach them, and since existing things and fictional things are different targets, their detection requires different intentional states.10 So much, then, for any suspicion of inconsistency between Aquinas’ treatment of the phoenix and the goatstag. But we still have the main issue to settle: how does Thomas respond to the question of how the unreal can be the object of any intentional state (never mind which one)? How can we

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understand or desire or discuss what’s not there to be understood, desired or discussed? When we say that a duck-billed platypus has some of the features of a duck and some of the features of a beaver, we know our statement is true because the platypus exists. But when we say that a goatstag has some of the features of a goat and some of the features of a deer, does our statement imply that the goatstag exists? Aquinas’ answer would seem to be a qualified yes. When discussing God’s knowledge of fictional things—things that do not exist, never have, and never will—he uses the analogy of an artisan who considers producing a certain work but does not in fact produce it. The product remains unactualized, yet the artist is speculatively aware that such a thing might be. This is also the case with God, who is aware of all the many things he can, but does not, cause to exist (cf., de Ver. 2.8). Consequently, when the objection is posed that one can only be aware of what exists, Thomas responds that nonexisting things do exist in a certain way, and in fact it’s only because they exist that they can be known, even by God: “God knows nonexistents insofar as they have existence in some way” (Sum. contr. gent. 1.66).11 Nonexisting things exist in God’s knowledge (de Ver. 3.6, ad. 1),12 or in God’s power (de Ver. 2.8, ad. 1)13 just as some nonexistents exist in the knowledge or the power of men. This point is made with unmistakable clarity in the Summa Theologiae under the heading, “Whether God has knowledge of nonexisting things”: God knows all things whatsoever that exist in any way. However nothing prevents things which do not exist in the most fundamental sense [simpliciter], to exist in some manner. For things which exist in the most fundamental sense are things which are actual, and things which are not actual exist in the power either of God himself or of a creature; this may be either in the active or passive power, or in the power of thought or of imagination, or according to any other manner of signification. Whatever therefore can be made, or thought, or said by the creature, as also whatever he himself can do, God is cognizant of all such things, even in cases where those things are not actual. And to that extent it can be said that He has knowledge even of nonexistents. (Sum. theol. 1.14.9)14

Thomas’ position is quite clear: things which we would normally say don’t exist do exist in God’s mind and power. God and sometimes creatures are able to make things which they do not make; these unmade things therefore

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exist within their respective abilities. God and sometimes creatures are consciously aware of these unactualized possibilities. These unmade things are therefore present in the mind.15 Students of Aquinas might suspect that his famous essence/existence distinction would lead him in a more meinongian direction when it comes to fictional objects. However, as the previous passage indicates, when Thomas thematically confronts the existential status of “nonexisting things,” he makes it clear that in his view such things exist as ideas in the intellect and latent potentialities in the will. He will not deviate from his bedrock conviction that being a thing and being an existing thing are equivalent. We may leave the theological content out of the discussion for the moment, and present Aquinas as saying that fictional objects exist in the mind or ability of the human person. Thus, talk of fictional objects is ultimately talk about ideas. The standard criticism of this model is that when we’re talking or thinking about fictional objects, we’re not talking about ideas.16 Psychologically, the boy isn’t afraid of the idea of a monster under his bed; he’s afraid of a monster under his bed. So too, when we say Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist, we don’t mean the idea of Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist—it does exist in the minds of everyone familiar with Doyle’s stories. (The same goes for conflating the nonexistent with human ability—it doesn’t line up with what we say or think. If we say access to food doesn’t exist for many people in the developing world, that doesn’t mean we don’t have the ability to provide it—we do.) These psychological and linguistic data simply illustrate what many take to be a truism: ideas are one kind of thing, and things outside the mind something else. To use Quine’s illustration ([1948] 2004: 178), we wouldn’t confuse the Parthenon with the Parthenon-idea, and by the same token we have no basis for confusing Pegasus with the Pegasus-idea. When we think about Pegasus we’re thinking about a physical horse, of flesh and blood, whom we would take enormous pleasure in riding, if only he were real. No one could possibly ride on the back of a mental configuration to Pegasus. Or to take unicorns: they don’t exist in heraldry or in books or in the imagination—what exist are certain pictures or written descriptions or mental images, and none of these things are unicorns. Unicorns don’t exist.

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But Aquinas’s understanding of the relations between things and ideas makes this sharp distinction less obvious. The key to grasping his model of fictional objects is the presupposition of a continuity between what’s in the mind and what’s outside the mind, to the extent that we can speak of the same thing being within the mind or outside the mind or both. The scholastic dictum goes cognitum est in cognoscente—the very thing known is the same thing that’s in the mind of the knower. Quine ridicules a confusion of the Parthenon with the Parthenon-idea, but to do Aquinas justice it would be better to read him not as confusing the Parthenon with the Parthenon-idea, but as deliberately identifying the two. For Thomas, as we’ve seen, the artifact exists in the artist’s mind before it comes to exist in the material world. Presumably then, he would say the same Parthenon existed in the mind of the ancient Greek architect before it came to exist in the landscape of the ancient Greek city-state. By the same token, Pegasus doesn’t exist in a fleshy, material way, but he does exist mentally. When we say Pegasus doesn’t exist, on Aquinas’s model, we’re saying that he doesn’t exist materially, not that he doesn’t exist at all. It isn’t a matter of confusing two different things, it’s a matter of affirming the identity of one thing which can exist in different ways. Ultimately, then, for Thomas the distinction between real and fictional comes down to whether a thing exists outside the mind or inside the mind only: “For there are some things which are wholly complete outside the soul; and these are complete beings, such as a man and a stone. However there are some things which are not at all outside the soul, such as the dreams and imagination of a Chimera” (Super sent., 1.19.5, a.1).17 This notion of one thing existing in different ways—sometimes in the mind only, and sometimes both within the mind and outside the mind—makes it harder to treat Thomas’s understanding of fictional objects as a naive form of realism. At first glance it seems we could apply this model satisfactorily to all our speech about so-called nonexistents: “Pegasus has wings” tell us that the idea of Pegasus includes the idea of wings, and “Pegasus doesn’t exist” tells us that Pegasus is restricted to the human mind. “Some ancient Greeks worshipped Zeus even though he doesn’t exist” means that some Greeks worshipped an entity that only exists as an idea. “I wish I could meet Sherlock Holmes” means (roughly) that I wish of Sherlock Holmes that he existed extramentally so that I could shake hands with him.18

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Still and all, the theory still struggles to get around the recalcitrant fact that things outside the mind and things inside the mind simply don’t seem to be identical. Matter, for instance. Matter can’t exist in the mind and outside the mind. For Aquinas, ideas are immaterial. So our idea of matter is immaterial. But if our idea of matter were just matter “existing in the mind,” then knowing what matter is would make matter immaterial, a seeming contradiction if ever there was one. (It doesn’t help to say that matter is only immaterial in the mind. To say that matter is, as such, immaterial under any conditions is to say that under certain conditions contradictions obtain.) Or, to prescind from the more controversial material/immaterial distinction, let’s take extramentality. We have some pre-theoretical understanding of what it means to be outside the mind (an understanding which grounds a great deal of the discussion of fictional objects). But if understanding means the object of understanding existing in the mind, then extramentality becomes something not extramental—in other words, we are left with an existing object that is at once both extramental and not extramental. The point is that there have to be two different things, the object of the mind and the mental configuration itself. The two can’t be identified, with nonessential differences (i.e., outside the mind, inside the mind, both) attached to a single entity.19 Which means that Quine is right: the Parthenon is a different thing (not the same thing with different properties) than the Parthenonidea, and Pegasus is a different thing than the Pegasus-idea. So in talking and thinking about the first, we’re not talking and thinking about the second. The Pegasus-idea exists, Pegasus doesn’t, and the two are not the same. In talking about Pegasus, we’re really talking about something that doesn’t exist, and that means that fictional realism, for all its varied and sophisticated defense, should leave us with little confidence in its soundness.

3

Meinongianism

The final possibility for dealing with what doesn’t exist distinguishes itself at the outset by two points of relatively superficial interest: the first is that it is named for a particular philosopher, Alexius Meinong. This can be a little annoying for those of us who subscribe to it: the other theoretical models for dealing with fictional objects aren’t branded with an association to a particular individual—why should we be saddled with an unbreakable bond to Meinong in nomenclature? He certainly wasn’t the first to explicitly characterize existence as a predicate, truly affirmed of some things and denied of others, or to argue that true things can be said about what doesn’t exist.1 Nor, needless to say, does support for meinongianism imply support for everything Meinong had to say about nonexistent objects. Quite the contrary, by contemporary lights he seemed to unnecessarily complicate matters a good deal in some places. Routley and Priest attempted to simplify the discussion with the term “Noneism,” and its accompanying definition: The admission of nonexistent objects is meinongianism, or, as I shall call it … following Routley/Sylvan, noneism. And let me stress, as he did, that nonexistent objects do not have some inferior mode of being, such as “subsistence.” They have no mode of being whatever. They do not exist in any sense of that word. (Priest 2005: 14)

Whether we use “meinongianism” (as I will, in deference to the predominant custom) or “noneism” or “intentionalism” (as in Smith 2002: 237ff ), the basic thesis is that fictional objects do not exist but do possess properties. To use Chisholm’s formula, “An object may have a set of characteristics whether or not it exists and whether or not it has any other kind of being” (1973: 245). Moreover, we speak about these objects truly when we attribute the properties

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they have to them and when we identify them as subject matter for our intentional states. We can say truly that the golden mountain is a favorite illustration for many philosophers, that it’s both mountainous and golden, and that it doesn’t exist. The other historical feature of this position is that its proponents find themselves perpetually in the minority, although that minority has included some very influential voices. The reason why meinongianism is relatively unpopular is easy to identify: it blithely contradicts the common-sense assumption that a thing can’t do anything or have anything or set itself up as a target for anyone’s intentional states if it doesn’t even exist.2 Given the force of this assumption, meinongianism’s primary challenge lies in showing how this assumption arises and showing too how the contrary of the assumption can be demonstrated to the satisfaction of common sense itself. Consequently, then, we’ll devote some space to seeing what meinongianism has going for it, and from there move on to the objections. The argument I’ll be making in this chapter is that meinongianism is the best option in terms of elegance, coherence, and correspondence to experience.

The benefits of meinongianism The first benefit of meinongianism is that it easily accommodates nearly everything we say about fictional objects. We say Sherlock Holmes is a detective, and so he is. We say Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist, and he doesn’t. We say Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about him, and that others made movies about him, and it’s true. If I tell my wife I had a dream involving Sherlock Holmes, then, presumably, it’s because I did have a dream involving Sherlock Holmes. If you say Sherlock Holmes is cleverer than any existing detective, well, you’re probably right, and if the police commissioner says he wishes he had Sherlock Holmes on his staff, we’re entitled to suppose that that’s precisely what the commissioner wishes. Following Azzouni (54–55), we can enumerate four fundamental intuitions about fictional objects: first, aboutness—the reason it seems like we’re talking or thinking about Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer is that we are indeed and in fact talking and thinking about Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer; second,

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normality—our thought and speech about fictional objects have the same structure as our thought and speech about real things (this is most evident when we mistakenly think the fictional object is real); third, truth—our speech practices indicate that we think some things said about fictional objects are true and others false: it isn’t true to say that Santa Claus is a red-nosed reindeer; fourth, nonexistence—we know Santa Claus, for all his popularity and distinctive character, doesn’t exist.3 Meinongianism satisfies all four of these intuitions with a refreshing simplicity. It also, in one sweeping cut, clears away the host of wearying distinctions introduced by alternative theories. Nominalists will introduce distinctions between truth-makers (which render propositions with non-fictional terms true or false) and truth-inducers (which render propositions with fictional terms true or false). It will introduce empty reference (which is ultimately spurious) from non-empty reference. Pretense theorists distinguish genuine implication and reference and emotion from pretend-implication, mock-reference, and make-believe-emotion. Russell and his ilk will pit existence against particularity. And object theorists will distinguish having and exemplifying properties from holding, encoding, or incorporating them. Even if there were no other reason (and as we’ve seen, there are good reasons) to think these accounts unsatisfactory, their unnatural complication should make us suspicious. By contrast the meinongian model recommends taking “existence” at face value. Some things exist, others don’t. This is true of classes and individuals, of things and their properties. On this strategy, if we take the word “exists,” and use it the way it’s generally used, this proliferation of fictional-object-related terminology can finally be checked. Meinongianism is also well-placed to explain our distinctive practices when engaging with fiction. Walton is right that any strategy hoping to deal successfully with fictional objects must give an account of the pretense that indisputably plays a key role here. The question is where to locate the pretense: are authors and readers of fiction pretending to represent and recognize certain things? In writing Oliver Twist, is Charles Dickens just pretending to write about Oliver Twist? Are we just pretending when we say that novel is about a miserable orphan who rises to prosperity and happiness? More plausibly the pretense in question involves pretending that Oliver Twist is real, that he

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existed as a historical person. Sometimes the pretense is so good that we forget we’re pretending—as in the case of a well-written, well-acted script—and we experience the fear or sympathy proportionate to existing things.4 If the emotional reaction grows undesirably intense, we remind ourselves, “It’s not real,” as a way to regain emotional stasis. The point being that the pretense This exists (not I’m describing/portraying/imagining something) is what distinguishes fiction from “true stories.” One fictional idiom that admittedly poses a challenge to meinongianism is when we speak of an author “creating characters.” This language provides at least some clear linguistic support for the model proposed by certain object theorists. If the character is created, then the character exists. But since Frodo Baggins does not exist, meinongians reply, then it is not, strictly speaking, true to say that J.R.R. Tolkien created him. Tolkien created books and, more importantly, created the idea of hobbits in general and of Frodo Baggins in particular. As we have already suggested, the most common confusion in the case of fictional objects is to misidentify the (nonexisting) object with the (existing) idea of the object, and it is no surprise that this confusion resurfaces in certain idioms. Why the confusion occurs we will consider further on. For now we will say that the meinongian can at least match the language of character “creation” with the language of character “invention,” a term etymologically linked more with discovery than with the bestowal of existence. When we say that Tolkien invented Frodo, we mean he found him, which is very often how artists describe their process of getting ideas anyway.

Separated only by existence A common strategy for refuting meinongianism is to argue that genuine things require a certain character that only real, extramental entities enjoy. Another way of putting the objection is to say that there is something other than existence which differentiates the way real things are from the way fictional objects are.5 Thus, for instance, it’s said that real things are determinate, while fictional objects are indeterminate. We don’t know what blood type Sherlock Holmes had, and there is no fact of the matter since Doyle didn’t determine that aspect

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of Holmes. Whereas a real detective has a certain blood type and no other. This is because he is concrete, complete in all details. Of course the determinateness of real things has come under considerable scrutiny, especially with the rise of anti-realism. Michael Dummett has argued that the principle of bivalence may be inapplicable not only to fictional objects, but also to real ones—on his view, real things could be of such a character as to not be one way or the other in various respects (Dummett 2006: 86–91). But even if we prescind from that debate, there’s no reason to think that an unreal person should be indeterminate. David Kaplan (1973: 516–517, n. 19) provides the thought-experiment of a particular sperm from my father and a particular egg from my mother, which, had they united, would have produced my third brother. Of course this brother doesn’t exist, and never will, and we may not know of all his determinations, but surely, given his complete biological makeup this nonexistent brother of mine is as determinate as I am. Here some may protest that fictional objects can’t be fully determinate since their determinations change depending on the way they’re presented. I may read my children a picture book in which King Arthur has blond hair, and then read them another with King Arthur sporting red hair. Which does he have? It seems easy to answer that in various unreal scenarios (we could use “possible worlds,” but that’s a heavily loaded notion) King Arthur has different determinations. In one unreal scenario King Arthur is blond, in another he’s red-headed. This is also the case with real objects; for instance, in the scenario depicted by the prosecution, O.J. Simpson is guilty of murder, while in the scenario depicted by the defense, he’s innocent. The difference, of course, is that there are certain properties which O.J. Simpson really has (although we might not always know which are which). Since the subject of properties has arisen, let’s do some sketching of how a meinongian might naturally conceive properties: First, of course, we have real things and unreal things. Real things are simply things that exist and unreal things are those that don’t. Next we have properties really possessed, and properties not really possessed. A property is really possessed if it contributes to the character of an existing thing in the real world. A property is not really possessed if it does not contribute to the character of the existing thing in the real world. This notion

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is an important and subtle one. A property can only be really possessed if it is possessed by an existing thing, and if it contributes to the way that existing thing is in the real world. So smurfs don’t really possess the property beingblue, Pegasus doesn’t really possess the property being-a-flying-horse, and Hilary Clinton doesn’t really possess the property of being-the-president-ofthe-United States. But real possession isn’t the same as genuine possession. On meinongianism, smurfs are genuinely, but not really, blue and Pegasus is genuinely, but not really, a flying horse. And Hilary Clinton might genuinely be president of the United States in some fictional scenario, but she’s not really the president of the United States. A final point (which will prove important later on): as long as we are acknowledging genuine nonexistents, we might suggest that some properties are themselves genuine but nonexistent. It seems natural to say that being-aflying-horse is an unreal property, although being-blue and being-president-ofthe-United States are real properties. In that case to be a nonexistent property would consist in being a property that could be possessed by nonexistent things but is not in fact really possessed by any existing thing. Back to the issue of complete determination: there is no reason to think that in any given scenario King Arthur’s properties should be quantitatively less than a real person’s. To whatever degree a real person’s properties can be enumerated, we can enumerate, in principle at least, an equal quantity of properties for King Arthur in any given fictional scenario. Presumably then, and lacking evidence to the contrary, King Arthur is no less determinate than an existing person. A related objection to meinongianism is that it leads to positing contradictory objects, since fictional objects are sometimes depicted as possessing contradictory properties. This occurs not only across different fictional scenarios (in which cases there isn’t a genuine contradiction: Sherlock Holmes is right-handed in one scenario and left-handed in another), but even in the same fictional scenarios. There might be a story, for instance, featuring a round square as the object of some absurd quest (cf., Priest’s fanciful and contradictory short story, 2005: 125–133). If we’re saying that fictional objects are legitimate objects, the implication seems to be that contradictory objects are legitimate objects, and that contradictory affirmations about them are true. Adding to the weight of this objection is the way influential meinongians

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have in fact embraced this position. Meinong himself and dialetheists Routley and Priest have argued for the truth of certain contradictions—Meinong, for instance, affirms that it is true to say that the round square is both round and square (1960: 82)—which they see as entailed by the character of nonexisting contradictory objects. It isn’t my goal here to sway meinongians from countenancing contradictory objects, but I do want to challenge the assumption that those who allow nonexistent objects are de facto bound to allow contradictory objects. I am myself dead set against contradictions, for two reasons: first, if I embrace a contradiction I seem to be disagreeing with myself, and if I disagree with myself I don’t see how I can expect anyone else to agree with me.6 The second reason is a theological reason: if we posit contradictory nonexistent objects, then there will be trouble about God’s omnipotence (can God create a contradiction? If not, then it seems he’s not omnipotent: some genuine things he can’t do. But if God can create a contradiction, then God can do absurd things—a deeply unsettling conclusion). I realize the issue is a tortuously complicated one, but to avoid a lengthy and probably inconclusive excursus let that suffice for my motivations in disassociation from dialetheism. As for meinongianism itself, I don’t see that it leads to positing contradictions to a greater extent than any other theory. Those who affirm contradictions can do so without any appeal to nonexistent objects, and in fact philosophers known for their predilection for contradiction, like Hegel or Priest, focus their arguments on demonstrating that contradictions obtain in the real world. For a meinongian like myself opposed to dialetheism, it’s a simple matter to again draw a parallel between real things and fictional things. If something real is contradictorily described, we would normally draw the conclusion that the thing in question has been misdescribed; so too if something fictional is contradictorily described, it seems we may conclude that the thing in question has been misdescribed. Of course the misdescription might be intentional in order to produce some comic or literary effect—and a real thing might be intentionally misdescribed for a similar motive. But, the objection continues, if we posit genuine nonexistent objects because we talk and think about nonexistent things, musn’t we posit contradictory objects because we talk and think about contradictory things? I doubt it, because I doubt that we do in fact talk and think about contradictory

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things. I ascribe to the old view that de dicto contradictions are incoherent and nonsensical combinations of meaningful words (this distinguishes it from gibberish nonsense), which don’t correspond to anything. Of course the two individual parts of a contradiction do express things, things which I think are de re mutually incompatible, and precisely because they’re incompatible they can’t be brought together into a single unit that can be referenced by our minds or words or emotions. The result is that we can’t think a contradiction, and we can’t express what we can’t think—and since nothing (existing or not existing) can be a contradiction, nothing can be referenced by a de dicto contradiction. A de dicto contradiction doesn’t express anything de re, neither a concept which originates the verbal contradiction nor an object to which the verbal contradiction points. Which means I don’t think we can use “the round square” to aptly express any truth, or any thoughts. We can, certainly, mention “the round square,” and mention it to express truth. We can say, truly, that this phrase doesn’t refer and that it couldn’t refer to anything that exists or to anything that doesn’t exist; this is, presumably, what we mean by saying that round squares are impossible. We can also use our normal idioms to express how someone thought that phrases like “the round square” are meaningful—as I did several pages back when I reported that Meinong thought the round square was round. Again, we can’t imagine a round square, or even conceive of it, so we can’t use “round square” to express something—and when we try, we get into all kinds of logical trouble. The relegation of contradictions to mention in truth-apt discourse is therefore legitimate for reasons not applicable to fictional speech.7 But what about descriptions that aren’t contradictory, and yet seem to lead to patently false conclusions—descriptions like “the existing unicorn”? If we can talk and think about existing unicorns, shouldn’t the implication be, for a meinongian, that existing unicorns are genuine objects? And since existing unicorns exist by definition, isn’t the further implication that some unicorns (the existing ones) do in fact exist? There are various ways of dealing with this problem,8 but I’ll deal with it by articulating some standards that must be met in order to qualify as an object or a thing. As briefly stated at the beginning of the first chapter, it seems to me that a thing is what can be truly ascribed some property. Therefore, if it is possible to truly say of x that it has property y, then x qualifies as something.

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If not, then “x” doesn’t refer. And, just to forestall a likely objection, I will add that by “property” I mean positive properties, and so exclude items like “beingnot-existent” or “being-not-consistent” or “being-not-possible.” Making these kinds of negative attributions to a grammatical subject would, I take it, not be so much to ascribe properties as to deny them. Now I think that we can truly say that Pegasus has wings, and that we can say lots of true things about lots of nonexistents. The whole point of everything argued up until now has been to demonstrate that it is very difficult to deny this basic intuition and practice of not only thinking and speaking about nonexistents, but of believing that we can think and speak about them truly. Therefore, the evidence suggests that they qualify as genuine objects. Pegasus is a thing. But not everything we can say about nonexistents is true. It would be generally regarded as true to say that Pegasus has wings, but it would be generally regarded as false to say that Pegasus exists. It would also be generally regarded as false to say that a square could be round. More than that, it would be generally agreed that ascribing something to “the real Pegasus” or “the round square” would imply the respective falsehoods just mentioned. And, I submit, one cannot ascribe a property truly if making that ascription implies a falsehood. Therefore, no true ascriptions can be made using “the round square” or “the real Pegasus.” Which means that using those expressions cannot succeed in referring to genuine objects. Finally we come to the issue of causality. What distinguishes a fictional object, it’s sometimes claimed, is that it can have no causal impact on anything else. Real things make a difference, while fictional things don’t. Here again, it seems to me that existence can do the work better and more simply in distinguishing fictional objects from real objects. For surely fictional objects exercise causality, have an impact, and make a difference—but only when it comes to other nonexisting things. Superman can’t really save real people, but he can and does save plenty of fictional people. True, he can fictionally save earth, but he doesn’t really save earth, since in the real world earth isn’t affected by the nonexistent actions Superman performs to neutralize nonexisting threats. This brings us to an absolutely crucial point regarding nonexisting things, and one which will hopefully remove a great deal of confusion: because fictional

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objects can’t have real effects, effects on the existing world, it is impossible that they should be the causal source of our knowledge about them. For, as we have pointed out repeatedly, our thoughts and feelings and words about nonexisting things are real, and must consequently be caused by something real. What then is the genesis of our knowledge about fictional objects?

Our knowledge of fictional things We’ve argued that as to themselves fictional objects are only to be distinguished from real objects by the existence possessed by the latter and not by the former. But this difference is one which yields more differences with regard to how we engage the two classes. Here I will simply assume, without argument, without commitment to an overly precise epistemology, and without getting embroiled in issues of warrant, that when we know something real it’s because the real thing has impacted us mentally in some real way. The objects of our knowledge—George Washington, the Magna Carta, Antarctica—have existed or acted in such a way as to result in our becoming aware of them. Nonexisting objects, by contrast, can’t be the causal source of our knowledge. They can’t have a real impact on us because we’re real and they aren’t. The causal origin of our awareness of fictional objects is our ideas of them, the ideas we create either spontaneously (e.g., dreams, hallucinations) or deliberately (e.g., storytelling, innovation). Our ideas of nonexisting things are real, and consequently can have real effects: they bring about an awareness and/or emotional reaction toward the nonexisting thing; if communicated, they can bring about an awareness and/or emotional reaction in other persons toward the nonexisting thing; they can even bring it about that the nonexisting thing comes into existence, as in the case of technological development. Consequently, the way we establish referential identity—the way we determine whether we’re talking or thinking about the same thing in two different contexts—will differ depending on whether the thing in question has existence or not. In both cases, I think, as do others,9 causal history is key to establishing identity conditions. You and I are thinking and talking about the same Gandhi if our thoughts and speech about him are connected by a chain of causes (although not necessarily the same chain of causes) to the same real

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person. You and I are thinking and talking about the same Mickey Mouse if our thoughts and speech about him are connected by a chain of causes (although not necessarily the same chain of causes) to the same real idea—presumably the idea which first came to exist in the mind of Walt Disney.10 Notice again, though, that we’re not thinking or talking about Walt Disney’s mental state when we’re talking about Mickey Mouse. As our cultural history has shown, Mickey Mouse is a much richer and multifaceted character than Disney could have imagined, especially when he first developed the idea of him. Rather, Disney’s mental state at a certain point in history is what makes us aware of Mickey Mouse and able to talk about him with others.11 We can say, then, that two people are indeed able to intend the same nonexistent object. Take Peter Geach’s famous Hob/Nob sentence: “Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she (the same witch) killed Cob’s sow” (Geach 1967: 628). Obviously Hob and Nob imagine the witch in question to exist, otherwise they wouldn’t wonder whether she’s responsible for some real effect. More importantly, however, they are able to think about the same witch because there is a common causal basis for their reference, namely, the initial suspicion (presumably had by Hob) of a witch responsible for the blight of a horse. Thomasson claims that for meinongians “the circumstances of creation can play no role in the identity conditions of fictional characters,” with the result that “such theories must classify characters with the same properties ascribed to them as identical even if they are so created merely accidently” (1999: 57). This strikes me as a confusion of the thing itself with the way we know it. Meinongianism proposes that fictional objects are objectively distinguished from each other by their properties, but this does not entail that they are subjectively distinguished—or identified—by us only by their properties. Two characters who are independently and identically described, with no causal/historical connection obtaining between the descriptions, may still be presumed to be different characters (at least, unless they are described completely, if such a thing is possible). In such a case we would presume that the properties which objectively differentiate the two characters are simply not described by the relevant fictional works. These criteria for identification also explain how people may be assured of referencing the same thing, even if they don’t know whether it exists or not.

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Donnellan (1974: 6) gives the example of Jacob Horn, a resident of Pennsylvania in the Colonial period who was once thought to be real but whose diary is now largely deemed a fabrication. Supposing Jacob Horn to have existed, those who consider and discuss him are thinking of the same person, because it was one person who lies at the causal origin of their thoughts and words. Supposing Jacob Horn did not exist, those who consider and discuss him are still thinking of the same person, because it was a certain contrived idea which effected the false diary and the various reactions to it. Most important, however, the difference in causal origin between our awareness of existing things and our awareness of nonexisting things explains the ingrained disposition to identify the fictional object with the idea of the fictional object. People want to say that Beowulf is an idea, because an idea is the causal origin of our awareness of Beowulf. This inclination, I believe, derives from the habitual, and true, identification of the existing object of our thought and speech with the existing causal origin of our thought and speech about that object. We talk about Abraham Lincoln and we recognize that our talk of Abraham Lincoln is causally dependent on Abraham Lincoln himself. Whereas when we talk about Beowulf, we recognize that our talk about Beowulf is causally dependent on the initial idea and fictional depiction of Beowulf. The result is we make the erroneous identification of what we know and that by which we know it. This is why, to again employ Quine’s example, we never confuse the Parthenon with the Parthenon-idea, while we are tempted to confuse Pegasus with the Pegasus-idea. A related issue: if fictional objects don’t cause our thoughts and speech about them, can they cause the truth (and falsity) of our thoughts and speech about them? Here I think “cause” is an infelicitous verb. Suppose we assume the classical, pre-kantian definition of truth in thought or speech as conformity of thought or speech to the thing thought about and spoken of. In that case what would determine whether thought or speech about a given nonexistent is true or not is whether it conforms to the nonexistent thing in question. Thus, in reading a Hercule Poirot mystery novel one may mistakenly believe (before reaching the novel’s conclusion) that the butler is the murderer in the scenario depicted by Agatha Christie. One discovers at the end of the book that this is an error; the butler, it turns out, was innocent all along. Now it wasn’t the butler (who doesn’t exist) who was causally responsible for the reader’s

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erroneous thoughts at the beginning of the book—so in that sense it wasn’t the butler who caused the reader’s error. Probably Agatha Christie, by telling the story in an intentionally misleading way so as to bring about the surprise ending, is ultimately the one responsible for the reader’s false judgment. But the judgment is false insofar as it doesn’t conform to the butler: the butler is not such that in the scenario under consideration he murdered anybody. The case is somewhat different for the inventor or primary (authorized?) describer of a fictional object. Barring contradiction or mistakenly thinking the thing is real, it doesn’t seem that the inventor of a fictional object can make mistakes about it. Doyle might have made esthetic mistakes in describing Sherlock Holmes, but it’s hard to see how, as long as he were consistent within the context of a single scenario, he could have made false claims about him (excepting, or course, the claim that Holmes is an existing person). Harry Deutch (2000: 155) talks of a realm of nonexistence he calls “the fictional plenitude,” which includes all nonexistent objects and their properties, and it is these objects which are denoted and described by fictional discourse. The inventor or authorized describer of a fictional object is therefore crucially influential in selecting not only the object of thought or speech in a given case, but also the scenario thought about and discussed at large. This doesn’t, of course, constitute a monopoly by the inventor on the given fictional object—other novelists or filmmakers or other fiction producers can modify the depiction of the subject in question, and discuss the same fictional object in a vastly different scenario. An instance: JK Rowling essentially declared, after writing the Harry Potter books, that according to her officially described scenario Dumbledore is homosexual, but her declaration doesn’t prevent people from imagining Dumbledore in alternative scenarios where he has different proclivities, or is free from sexual desire altogether.

Meinongianism and common sense The benefits meinongianism brings to organizing our reflexive intuitions have already been mentioned. To review those benefits from a different angle, we can follow Zalta’s four-fold division of truths about fictional objects: (a) those expressing historical facts, such as the fact that some scientists believed in

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the existence of the planet Vulcan, (b) the valid inferences involving fictional objects (such as those discussed in Chapter 1), (c) the true characterization of how fictional objects are depicted in fiction (e.g., it is true to say that MacDuff is represented as being born by cesarean), (d) truths expressing our engagement with fictional objects, such as Jeeves being Wodehouse’s most famous character. All these phenomena, and their expressions in speech, are validated by the meinongian system, since it affirms that nonexistent objects have character and characteristics and are intentionally targeted by us in a variety of ways. The work for what I think can serve as the appeasement of common sense has also been done along the way. Common sense objects that nonexistent things can’t have properties, and also that nonexistent things are really just existing ideas, and that what we appear to say about the former we actually say about the latter. To this I reply that common sense rightly balks at nonexisting things really having existing properties, but not at nonexisting things having properties which don’t contribute to the way things exist in the real world. The model we have elucidated here allows us say with perfect equanimity, “Of course nonexisting things don’t really possess properties. They only have them in various fictional scenarios. Smurfs aren’t really blue. Pegasus isn’t really a flying horse. The wings he has, Pegasus’ wings, don’t exist. He can fly, but not in the real world, because he’s not real.” The man in the street would be fine with all that. As to the second apparent conflict with common sense, we’ve looked at how the identity of existing objects of awareness and the causal origins of that awareness leads naturally to the false identification of nonexisting objects of awareness with the causal origins of that awareness (which are the ideas of the objects). Common sense recognizes that a horse of flesh and blood is not a mental entity, since there aren’t any physical horses hiding in anyone’s brain or mind. So too, common sense recognizes that a unicorn of flesh and blood isn’t a mental entity, since there aren’t any physical unicorns hiding in anyone’s brain or mind. Presumably common sense can more unreservedly affirm this latter proposition once the reason for the misidentification of the fictional object and mental configuration to that object has been explained.

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To summarize Part One: fictional nominalism struggles in the face of the fact that what we apparently say about fictional things is in fact psychologically, logically, and grammatically about those fictional things, and is sometimes true and sometimes false. Fictional realism struggles in the face of the fact that fictional things don’t exist, whether as real other-world denizens, eternal abstractions, or mental entities. Meinongianism can haggle with the two baseline intuitions against it: to Fictional objects can’t have properties, it answers, “No—fictional objects can have properties, they just can’t have properties which characterize them in the real world. Fictional objects can’t really possess properties.” To Fictional objects are ideas, it answers, “No, you can’t really think that. You’ve just been confused because the whole conversation about this fictional object started with an idea in someone’s head.” Finally, what are we going to do about “to be”? Well, whatever we want. As with other questions of formal semantics or even standard idioms, we can make our own decisions. It seems to me that non-copula uses of “to be” generally affirm existence, and so wouldn’t be truly predicated of nonexistent objects. So, “There is such a thing as the Loch Ness Monster” would be taken by normal English-speakers to affirm existence, and so should be treated as false, as should “The Loch Ness Monster is.” This is how I will understand these locutions from here on. Of course there’s nothing to prevent someone from taking non-copula uses of “to be” to attribute only genuineness, or “thingness”—but not existence—to the subject, in which case “There is such a thing as the Loch Ness Monster,” or “The Loch Ness Monster is” would express a truth compatible with the truth expressed by “The Loch Ness Monster does not exist.” The same goes for “some.” There’s certainly no contradiction involved in saying “Some things don’t exist,” or “Some things aren’t,” as long as “some” isn’t existentially loaded. Lewis (1990) essentially argued that while nonmeinongians mean the same thing by “exists” and “is something,” on his view meinongians like Routley don’t ultimately believe in their own muchfussed-over distinction between existing and nonexisting, but simply believe in [the existence of] more kinds of things (thus, he describes Routley as an “Allist”). By the same token, Lewis suggested that non-meinongians should

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be characterized not as existentially loading “some” or “there are,” but with existentially unloading “exists,” in which case, again, the only difference between non-meinongians and meinongians would be that the former believe in fewer [existing] things. But this is a deeply unsatisfying construal of the debate from the meinongian’s perspective; the meinongian doesn’t just want to argue for more kinds of things—or at least I don’t. I want to argue for a continuity across the existing/nonexisting divide, such that the same thing can pass over it, and go from one state to the other. The theological relevance of such continuity will be the subject of the next chapter.

Part Two

God’s Existence and Nonexistents

4

Contingency and Nonexistence

Cosmological arguments, which, generally speaking, attempt to reason from the fact and character of the universe to the existence of God, reproduce and multiply with such promiscuity that trying to find a common thread to the cluster, especially an uncontroversial common thread, would be, I think, injudicious. Without hoping to identify or organize the various arguments generally classed under the heading “cosmological,” I will simply address two kinds of arguments for God in the next two chapters: (a) arguments which appeal to God’s existence as an explanation (or the necessary condition of an explanation) for the existence of the world or one of its features, (b) arguments which make the case that there is an inherent and recognizable (to us) contradiction in the claim that God (understood as a perfect thing) does not exist. The former group of arguments we will term cosmological, but in any case they have in common that they are looking for an explanation for the existence of finite things. The second group of arguments we will term ontological, and have in common that they attempt a reductio ad absurdem from the premise that a perfect thing does not exist.1 This chapter will be devoted to meinongianism and the first set of arguments, and Chapter 5 will be devoted to meinongianism and the second set of arguments. So we begin with God as an explanation (or the necessary condition of an explanation—a precision I will henceforth assume) for the existence of some natural thing, or even for the whole of nature itself. (And let me establish before going further that I will be using “cause” to denote an explanation found outside the character of the thing to be explained.) But why should we think that any natural phenomenon needs an explanation? What prompts us to look for a cause? Probably it is that we recognize that the thing in question—the dog, the tree, myself, an electron, the solar system—might not be here. But,

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of course, this thing, whatever it is, is here. So how did we get the idea that it might not be here? Robert Sokolowski (1998; cf., 1992) has argued that the making of distinctions lies at the core of the philosophical enterprise, since we cannot deal thematically with a given subject matter unless we are able to set it off from what it is not. We do not have an explicit recognition of day without night, of right without left, or of male without female. In fact, it seems reasonable to presume that unless we had some clear awareness of the latter items, we would not even devise words to reference the former. Even in cases where there is not clear logical contrarity, there must be contrast. We know what gravity or color or friendship is because we have experiences of things which do not consist in gravity (e.g., magnetism) or color (e.g., sound) or friendship (e.g., isolation). Now the arguments for God as cause begin with a thematic awareness and curiosity concerning natural things insofar as they exist; the implication therefore seems to be that a basic distinction has been made between these and those things that do not exist. If the arguments are correct, then not only do we recognize the distinction, but we recognize further that those things that do exist might not have existed and perhaps will not exist in the future, and that certain things that do not exist, and perhaps never will, might have existed. Only when this has been done, only when it has been clearly perceived that existing things might not exist and that nonexisting things might exist, do we begin to wonder why in fact the cards have fallen the way they have. If the parceling out of existence to some things and not to others were selfexplanatory, which is to say, if everything that did exist had to exist, and everything that didn’t exist couldn’t exist, then there would be no further questions to ask, and the causal path to God would be cut short before it could even begin. Likewise, if we were aware only of what exists and unaware of what doesn’t exist, then we could not recognize the disparity between the two classes, and the urge to make sense of that disparity by appealing to a creator would disappear. We might conclude, then, that an admission of nonexisting things is an epistemological prerequisite to the cosmological argument. If we weren’t aware that some things exist and other things don’t, we wouldn’t ask why existing things actually do exist. But it seems too that the legitimacy of talking about nonexistent things is also logically bound up in the cosmological argument.

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The arguments from causality employ the notion of contingency, of the possible nonexistence of a given thing or property. In which case it is possible that a given thing (say, the moon) does not exist. Now usually when we say that a thing might not be the way it is, we are able to translate that insight in terms of propositional truth-values about the thing in question. Thus, if we say that a given person might not be churlish (“she could have a better disposition if she wanted to”) or that a house might have a different color than it has (“I wish they hadn’t painted it salmon”), we can infer from these claims that in certain possible counterfactual situations it would be true to say of this particular person that she is not churlish or of this particular house that it is not salmoncolored. Following the structural parity of the grammar, if we say that the moon itself might not have existed, it seems we should be able to conceive of a scenario in which one could truly say of the moon itself that it doesn’t exist. But in such a possible situation one would be truly describing an ex hypothesi nonexistent. And if speech about nonexistents is possibly true, then it surely is not senseless. Consequently, if (as a first glance at the matter would suggest) arguments from causality to God imply that talk about nonexistents is coherent, those who support such arguments should be interested to protect such talk from the charge of senselessness.

Necessarily caused? It will be objected that we have gone too fast here. For we have, it will be said, unjustifiably wedded the concepts “in need of a cause/explanation” and “possibly nonexistent.” These two notions, the objector continues, should be treated as perfectly distinct, and only the first notion as required by the cosmological argument. The idea of a necessarily existing thing that is also caused is a central issue in the debates about God and abstract objects—a debate we will examine more fully in Chapter 6. Of course some theists disavow belief in the existence of abstract objects altogether, but those who think things like numbers and properties and mathematical truths exist independently of the natural world of spacetime are concerned to harmonize this conviction with traditional views about God’s power, self-sufficiency, and universal causality.

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Consequently, certain philosophers are committed to arguing that abstract objects are necessarily caused by God. But if abstract objects can be necessarily caused by God, why not the other phenomena used by cosmological arguments as starting points? Why not rest content with the insight that there appears to be a causal structure in the universe? For all we know—or at least for all we need to know for the sake of the argument to the First Cause—this causal structure could be such that the causal relationships between all the items in the structure could not be otherwise than they are. In any case, no need to complicate the matter by throwing issues of nonexistence into the mix. Framing the relationship between God and other things in terms of necessary causality involves serious difficulties. For instance, what is the difference between necessarily causing something and simply being that something? What is the difference between A necessarily causing B, and A and B comprising a single object with two aspects? And, as a matter of fact, whatever God is said to necessarily cause generally gets assimilated to God’s very self. Spinoza is the classic example, where God necessarily causing everything ends up as God just being everything. With the God and abstract object debate, the same assimilation occurs. Abstract objects, when presented as being necessarily caused by God, are usually further described as being like God’s thoughts—which would intuitively be considered as part of a person, especially if the person thought those thoughts necessarily. In fact, traditional theists like Aquinas would actually identify the divine ideas with the divine essence (although Aquinas is consistent in not describing the relationship between God and his ideas as causal). Certainly, efforts are made to preserve the distinction between God and the things he is said to necessarily cause, but both historically and conceptually the distinction seems a tenuous one.2 But supposing we allow for the sake of argument that the items of everyday experience are necessarily caused, we are still confronted with the issue of nonexistence—even if the nonexistence in question is impossible. This is because, as I think, the notion of cause itself is inextricably bound up with the notion of existence. We can show this by pointing to the simple intuition that when we say that B exists because A caused it, it means that were A not there to cause B, B wouldn’t exist. This is called the counterfactual analysis of causation: “A causes B” entails that if there were no A, there would be no

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B, all other things being equal (i.e., in the nearest possible world). In other words, unless something other than A were to fulfill the same causal function of bringing B about, B wouldn’t exist if A didn’t exist. The counterfactual analysis of causation has come in for a good deal of criticism in the last several decades, and it seems pretty well established that most counterfactual formulas don’t fully capture the reality of causation. I certainly have no desire to try my hand at formulating a comprehensive counterfactual analysis of causation. All the same, I think at least a minimal counterfactual entailment is involved in all causal claims. To be precise, I think “E is caused” implies that E got its existence from somewhere else: from E’s parents or from E’s manufacturer or from the forces of nature that brought E into being. Now if E had to get its existence from something else (i.e., its cause or causes), it seems evident that E doesn’t have its existence on its own. If a glass gets filled with water from somewhere else, the implication is it wasn’t full beforehand—and an empty glass can’t fill itself. So what is the minimal counterfactual entailment attached to “E is caused”? Just this: if E didn’t get its existence from somewhere else, it wouldn’t exist. Of course, continuing the metaphor, this doesn’t require that the glass be filled by the exact pitcher that did in fact fill it, since there may be any number of pitchers in line to fill the waiting glass. But if it weren’t filled from something else, something already full, the glass would be empty, and similarly if something is an effect, the implication is that without a cause it wouldn’t have existed. Another objection: what grounds are there for positing that causation involves existence, and specifically the existence of objects or substances? Why should we not confine the phenomenon of causation to cases of events, properties, event occurrence, property exemplification, propositional truthmaking, or fact-construction? There is no reason here to invest in any one theory about the exact nature of causal relata, nor to commit to a realistic or anti-realistic position on facts, propositions, or properties (I will come close to making such a commitment later on). For our purposes, we need only establish two points about causation and concrete objects; one is that the existence of any given concrete object in our experience is generally recognized by common sense as having been caused. We point at actual, spatio-temporal things and say, “How did this get

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here?” or “What made this?” or “What’s responsible for this?” We say that the parents are causes of the child, that the artist is the cause of the picture, and that rain is the cause of the puddle. This is not to deny that objects need to be further specified in their role as effects (or causes). Nor is it to say that no other kind of thing can be classed as an effect (or cause). But certainly the consensus of linguistic practice is that individual, concrete things can be effects. The second point is that unless there are existing objects in the real world, then it seems there can’t be facts in which those objects are interrelated, nor can there be true propositions corresponding to those facts, nor can there be real properties (we wouldn’t call them “properties” unless we thought of them as being in relationship to proprietors). Since, therefore, concrete objects are a fundamental kind of thing indispensable to the notion of other kinds of things, we will take their existence, and the causes which bestow it, as paradigmatic for real causation.3 Returning now to the overarching point about causation and nonexistence, even supposing that the effect is bound to be caused, still, the very fact that the effect is caused implies that—per impossibile, which we are granting for the sake of argument—were there nothing to cause the effect then the effect would not exist. Note here that we are not making any sweeping claims about the proper logical interpretation of subjunctive claims with impossible antecedents. We are simply articulating what it means for an effect to owe its existence to a cause or causes. Nothing can give what it doesn’t already have, and nothing can receive what it has already. So since an effect receives existence from outside itself, the proper conclusion is that of itself it doesn’t have what it takes to exist. If left to itself, it wouldn’t exist. Thus, even if necessary causation is a notion that makes sense, it still imports with it some notion of nonexistence, namely, the default nonexistence of the effect. Which means that if God caused the world and everything in it, then if left to itself the world would be just one more unreal scenario, and all the things making up the world would be nonexistents. One more objection pertaining to the logical link between causation and nonexistence: in the previous chapter we said that causal relationships could obtain between nonexisting things just as they may obtain between existing things; but now we have described causality as the granting of existence to one thing by another. But when a fictional object causes another fictional object,

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the latter doesn’t begin to exist. In other words, the analysis of causation just given appears to run counter to the meinongian account of causation outlined at the end of Chapter 3. We should either deny that causal relations obtain between nonexisting things or revise the claim that causes confer existence. In fact, I’ll do the latter. Again, unreal causes cannot have any causal impact on the real world. So we should, presumably, qualify what we have said about causation in this section as pertaining only to real causes and effects, that is, causal relations obtaining between existing things. Still, we can, without too much complication, provide a general characterization of causation that holds good for existing and nonexisting cases. That characterization is as follows: a cause is something that makes something else to be a member of its (the cause’s) own scenario/world. In the real world, this means causes grant existence to their effects, since existence is the condition of membership in the real world. In fictional scenarios, causes do not grant existence to their effects (although, as has been shown, the makebelieve typically involved in fictional storytelling includes pretending that the effects, like the causes, exist). But the nonexistent causes are still legitimate causes insofar as they are responsible for their effects’ presence in the particular scenario in question. Thus, Bob Cratchit could say to Tiny Tim what any real father might say to his son, “I helped bring you into this world.” Surely parenthood deserves at least that minimal credit, whatever the context, and the same goes for causation generally. Tiny Tim has a father, which means he has a cause, which means that of himself he needn’t have been in the scenario which Dickens’s fiction described. To say of a nonexistent that it’s caused is to say that there’s no reason why it has to be in the particular scenario in which it finds itself. In the story of Icarus, it is Daedelus who makes the wings. Does he make them to be? No, he simply makes them to be part of the scenario in which he is a part (fictional scenarios, like individual fictional objects, are made up of many parts, and some of those parts are causally connected). Icarus’s wings, moreover, cause the suspension of Icarus’s body between sky and sea, which is to say that if the wings were to be removed from the scenario, and nothing else were to step in to suspend Icarus, then Icarus would fall—and that, of course, is precisely what happens in the classical scenario (i.e., the scenario described by the classical story).

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Fictional object nominalism and contingency We come now to the core thesis of this chapter, namely that the meinongian system is the model of nonexistents most congruent with the theist’s conviction that there has to be a first cause. The basic argument runs like this: to say that God is the cause of natural things entails that the nonexistence of natural things is a possibility, or at least a coherent notion (the point just established); non-meinongian systems have a difficult time conceiving of the nonexistence of natural things; therefore non-meinongian systems harmonize poorly with classical theism. Clearly, the argument demands that we now focus our energies on establishing the second premise. We will begin with what we have called the nominalist position, which holds that fictional objects are non-things, they do not exist, and so do not have properties. Nothing is a chimera, no thing is a chimera, and of every thing it is true to say that it is not a chimera. Why should this model pose a problem for theologians wishing to affirm the possible nonexistence of natural things? For a start, it should be evident that nominalism entails not only that a chimera doesn’t exist, but that a chimera couldn’t exist. If “chimera” refers to nothing, to no thing, to no kind of thing, then it’s meaningless to claim that such a thing could exist. The “such a thing” doesn’t denote anything, so how could it signify to talk about “such a thing” existing? It’s plainly nonsensical to propose that an absence of properties could be made to exist. Nor does “Chimeras might exist” seem sensible if what’s meant is “One of the particular things that does exist might have been a chimera.” Which particular thing that does exist? This squirrel, right here? That cloud? One of these hydrogen atoms? Which of these real objects might have been a chimera? What would it even mean for this object to have been a different kind of object? The idea strikes one as absurd: if a child pointed at a squirrel crossing the street and said, “Why isn’t that squirrel a chimera?” we would either take refuge in trivial reaffirmation (“Because it’s a squirrel”) or ask for clarification. But if the possibility of nonexistents being real falls apart on Russell’s paraphrase system, the possibility of a change in the opposite direction is also compromised. Traditional theism requires its adherents to profess, “Look around. All this, all the trees and flowers and mountains might not have

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existed. This horse might not have existed; horses in general wouldn’t have existed, had God not created them.” What would a nominalist make of such claims? Take “Horses might not exist.” For Russell’s nominalism, this signifies, essentially, “It might have been that every existing thing was not a horse.” But of course, such a claim is only true if we can point at every individual existing thing and meaningfully say, “That might not have been a horse.” Can we? Can we cogently point at that dappled horse in the field across the way and say, “That might not have been a horse”? What else could it possibly have been? It is a horse; if it weren’t a horse, it wouldn’t be itself, so what sense can there be in speaking as though that particular thing might have been something else? We can frame the issue in terms of the basic question that gets the cosmological argument started: “Why does that exist?” Of course, since Russell’s system prohibits putting existence-predicates with individuals, we may confine ourselves to classes. So begin with the question, “Why do horses exist?” If we translate this à la Russell, the question becomes “Why are some particular (existing) things horses?” Again, this question can only be answered by descending to the level of individual cases: why is any particular thing a horse? Why is that dappled horse across the way a horse? How would a mother answer if her child pointed and said, “Why is that a horse?” Would she answer in terms of causality? Surely not. She would either enumerate various essential equine features (“Because it has four legs and that long mouth and that kind of graceful form, and it belongs to the subspecies equus ferus”) or simply appeal to its essence wholesale (“Because that’s what it is”). What the mother would surely not do is suggest that the horse might have been other than a horse. Moving back up the scale of generality, then, the answer to “Why are some particular things horses?” becomes “Because that’s what horses are.” By implication “Because that’s what horses are”—not “Because something caused it,” much less “Because God made it”—also becomes the proper answer to “Why do horses exist?” Since I’ve had to bring up the idea of essence I’d better explain what I mean by it here. By “essence” I mean the sum of a thing’s essential features, and by “essential features” I mean features or groups of features without which a thing wouldn’t be what it is. I am very confident that just about all things have essential features, and this is why: if a thing didn’t have essential features then it would be possible to change all its features and still be the same

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thing. But for anything to change all its features would consist in becoming completely different from what it was before. Consequently, if a thing didn’t have any essential features, it could become a completely different thing while remaining the same thing, which is as neat an absurdity as one could hope to reach by reductio. In practice when a child asks a question about non-essential features, we answer by referencing something other than the thing in question. Why is that triangle red? Because the pen that drew it had red-colored ink. Why is that magnet so large? Because the manufacturer wanted to make an exceptionally large magnet. By contrast, when a child asks a question about essential features, we answer the question by referencing the thing itself. Why does that magnet attract ferromagnetic materials? Because of the way the magnet is internally constituted. Why is that triangle three-sided? Because that’s what a triangle is. The whole goal of arguments for God’s existence based on causality is to move from the questions about the existence of things to the causes that are other than those things. But if “Why do people exist?” becomes “Why are some of the particular things in the real world people?” which reduces to “Why is she a person? Why is he a person?” and so forth, then we can’t get beyond the immanent object under consideration to a cause, let alone a first cause—we’re stuck more or less enumerating the essential features of personhood in the case of each individual person. So if fictional object nominalism is rigorously held, the cosmological argument can’t get off the ground. The theories of Walton and Azzouni, which disassociate our speech about fictional objects from its metaphysical implications, unsurprisingly take us further from an ontology that can include the possible nonexistence of concrete objects. Taking Walton first, recall that for him all talk about nonexistents is technically pretend talk. Even negative existentials indicate by a kind of verbal pantomime that certain ways of talking have no subject matter. Thus, “Tom Sawyer doesn’t exist” indicates that all speech-acts of the “Tom Sawyer”-type don’t refer. “Kendall Walton exists,” by contrast, indicates that speech-acts of the “Kendall Walton”-type are—at least sometimes—referential. It’s hard to know for sure how this system would handle a sentence like “Kendall Walton might not exist.” Presumably, if it signified anything, it would be that all the speech-acts of the “Kendall Walton”-type might have failed to refer. But then why don’t they fail to refer? Is it because of certain external

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causes, terminating (perhaps) in a first, ultimate cause? We should ask the question according to the canons of the system under scrutiny. “Why does Kendall Walton exist?” is the colloquial question, and in the present scheme it asks simply why it is that “Kendall Walton”-type speech-acts are referential. Now to answer that question we would have to ask what mechanisms are operative in referent-fixing for parts of speech in general, which of course takes us right out of the realm of metaphysics and squarely into linguistics. To put it plainly, pretense theory implies that the answer to the question, “Why does Kendall Walton exist?” isn’t “Because he was caused,” but “Because that’s how language works.” Pretense theorist Fred Kroon attempts to salvage our intuitions about the possible existence of fictional objects, a salvaging which, if successful, might salvage also our intuitions about the possible nonexistence of real things. In any case, here’s his suggestion: why not say that we use certain properties in our pretense, and then acknowledge that even though using these properties in real-world conditions to reference something doesn’t succeed, it might have been the case that using these properties under other conditions would have succeeded. So, for instance, suppose I am an only child. Then one will not be able to use the property of being-my-sibling to successfully refer—but that property might have been successfully used to refer if another one of my father’s sperm had penetrated one of my mother’s ova (Kroon 2000: 115–116). By implication, presumably, the property of being-Fred-Kroon would not have been truly applicable to anything if the sperm and egg which combined to make Fred Kroon had not in fact combined. This laudable effort to be true to our intuitions about contingency seems to achieve its end only by being badly unfaithful to pretense theory itself. For instance, it appears that Kroon is a nominalist about fictional objects, and yet a realist about fictional-object properties, in which case “the boy written about in Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is a vacuous pretense, but the property of being-the-boy-written-about-in-Mark Twain’snovel-The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is real, and can be cogently spoken of. But how does sham speech suddenly become the vehicle for cogent, contentfilled expression just by prefixing our grammatical subject with the word “being” and adding some hyphens? More critically, though, the way Kroon defends our intuitions about certain properties possibly, but not actually,

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being referentially applicable is to appeal to a fictional event. We might have been able to talk about my older brother X—we can’t now, of course, but we might have—if only the penetration of an egg by one of my father’s sperm years before my birth had happened. But of course for pretense theory to be consistent, the fictional phrase “the penetration of an egg by one of father’s sperm years before my birth” can’t be taken as referring to a real event, and so it doesn’t refer to anything. It’s nonsense. And we can’t talk nonsense to sensibly explain or justify our intuitions about contingency. If pretense theory is right, all counterfactual analyses don’t signify, and any appeal to them by a pretense theorist should be treated as flatly inconsistent. As far as Azzouni’s radical nominalism, any critic is bound to be hesitant in making arguments from common speech or experience when the other party declares both to be irrelevant to our overall convictions about the way things are. Still, we may say that for Azzouni, as for fictional-object nominalism as a whole, if nonexistents don’t have features, then it becomes self-evident (and therefore not in need of an external causal explanation) why the real items in our experience aren’t nonexistents. Jody Azzouni isn’t a nonexistent because Jody Azzouni has features. Why does he have features? Because he’s a human being. Why is he a human being? Because that’s what he is. So Jody Azzouni exists because he’s Jody Azzouni. No other explanation, on the nominalist model, is required.

Fictional object realism and contingency If “to not exist” means to not be anything, then the existence of natural realworld items hinges simply on natural objects being something. This doesn’t require an external cause. But if “to not exist” means to be a different kind of thing than existing things, then the reason why familiar objects of experience exist is simply because they’re a different kind of thing than a fictional object. In other words, real things aren’t fictional objects simply because the former are real objects. And this also doesn’t seem to require a cause. Take the most extreme form of fictional object realism, Lewis’s modal realism. On that model there are other worlds with existing unicorns in them, and there are other worlds where David Lewis never existed, or where

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he existed differently than he existed here at our actual world. Precisely what distinguishes one world from another is the unique collection of things each world comprises. Change one little thing within our world and you will have described some other world. Change one little thing about David Lewis in this world, and you will have described a slightly different counterpart to David Lewis existing in some other world. But then the question, “Why am I not different than I am?” or “Why is this world not different than the way it is?” becomes “Why am I not a different thing [i.e., some other thing existing in some other world]?” or “Why is this world not some different world?” Now again it seems easy enough to answer these questions by saying that these things aren’t other things, or these worlds aren’t other worlds, because they are the things and worlds they are. In Lewis’s words: It is as if I were to call it arbitrary, for instance, that I am David Lewis rather than being Peter Unger. Is that arbitrary? It is a selection of just one alternative out of a range, sure enough. And I would say that it is in a sense contingent; just as other worlds are alternative possibilities for a world, so other individuals are alternative possibilities for an individual … But it is not a fact about the world that I am David Lewis rather than being Peter Unger. A fortiori it is not a fact that cries out for explanation. (Lewis 1986: 130)

So why do this-world horses exist? Ultimately, because this world isn’t a different world, anymore than David Lewis is Peter Unger. Why isn’t this world a different world? There doesn’t seem to be an answer to such a question other than to enumerate various characteristics of the world. Again, instead of looking for a cause external to the world, one would simply reference the distinctive character of the thing for which the explanation was originally sought. What is the need, then, for an uncaused cause? Lewis allows for a kind of causal contingency in his system, but his idea of causal contingency again reduces to identifying differences between worlds. If we wish, we can answer why? questions with familiar kinds of causal answers. Why does the horse exist? Because the parent horses mated. The mating of the particular stallion and mare causes the horse we are considering. For Lewis, moreover, causality claims are to be interpreted counterfactually: if the stallion and mare hadn’t mated, the foal wouldn’t have existed. But the counterfactual claim itself is to be interpreted in terms of the multitude of

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worlds: there is a different world, sufficiently similar to ours, in which the otherworld counterparts to our stallion and mare didn’t mate, and there is no otherworld counterpart to our this-world foal. Why then does our foal exist? In short, because in a different world, different things exist and different things happen—and in this world these things exist and these things happen. We can specify the comparison to a greater or lesser degree, but asking for causal explanation can’t get us past the comparison. In which case asking for causal explanation can’t get us to God. In the case of object theory, where fictional objects are some kind of existing thing to which we legitimately refer and about which we make true, false, and pretended claims, negative existentials might be supposed to identify certain kinds of things as fictional objects. Thus, “Pegasus doesn’t exist” could be taken to mean that Pegasus is a fictional object (instead of a flying horse) with properties proportionate to fictional objects, and decidedly not the properties proportionate to other objects with which it is portrayed in fictional (or mistaken) contexts. The theological problem with this reading is, again, the element of contingency. If “doesn’t exist” is an idiom for “is a fictional object,” it follows that “might not exist” signifies “might have been a fictional object.” But could real, concrete spatio-temporal things have been fictional objects? It seems not. In Kripke’s words, “Napoleon couldn’t have been a mere fictional character, any more than he could have been a prime number” (2013: 149). It doesn’t matter whether fictional objects are construed as speech-behavior patterns, abstract objects, or cultural artifacts—Napoleon is a completely different kind of thing, and there’s no reason to think he could have been any of these. Perhaps, then, negative existentials should be paraphrased with greater nuance. van Inwagen suggests the following as a translation of “Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist”: No one has all the properties the fictional character Sherlock Holmes holds (nor has anyone very many of the most salient and striking of these properties). (2003: 146)

This translation doesn’t imply the convertibility of normal, spatio-temporal things and fictional objects, but still suggests that the coming to be of a fictional object would be impossible. Consider again that the question, “Why

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is David Lewis not Peter Unger?” does not seem to require a causal cause. Why not? Because it seems that David Lewis could not be Peter Unger, since they are essentially different persons. If one became the other he would no longer be the person he was. We might say, then, that David Lewis and Peter Unger have irreducibly unique core properties that are not compatible with the other person’s irreducibly unique core properties. We can lump these irreducibly unique core properties together and call them haecceity (“thisness”), or just call them individual essences. The notion of individual essences clarifies why we don’t need causal explanation to explain why two different things of the same kind aren’t identical. If someone pointed to two chairs and said, “Why isn’t this chair that chair?” we would be perplexed, we would act as though the question didn’t make sense, just as we would if we were asked why a squirrel isn’t a horse. In neither case would we instinctively provide causal narratives. So to ask why one thing doesn’t have another thing’s individual essence is the same kind of category mistake as asking why one kind of thing isn’t a different kind of thing. Now one of the properties that Sherlock Holmes holds—that is, one of the properties he’s fictionally represented as having, or one of the properties commonly associated with him—is a unique individual essence, a unique personal character not compatible with the individual essences of other things. He’s represented as having, as everything else has, a haecceity, different from every other thing’s haecceity, which prevents him from being anything other than himself and anything else from being him.4 Therefore, according to van Inwagen’s proposal, that should be counted as one of the properties Sherlock Holmes holds. But if “Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist” means “No one has the properties Sherlock Holmes holds,” then we must conclude that no one could have the properties he holds, because no one could have a different haecceity than the one he or she already has, and therefore no one could have the haecceity Sherlock Holmes holds (is represented as having). In which case it’s not only the case that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist, but that he couldn’t exist. Following the same line of reasoning, once existence is made coextensive with the possession of properties, individual essences ensure that existing things can’t fail to exist. If we ask why something has the individual essence it has, the answer would be “Because that’s what (or who) that is.” If a child were at one of van Inwagen’s lectures, pointed at the speaker, and asked, “Why

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is he Peter van Inwagen?”—which is to say, why does he have the property of being who he is and not someone else?—we wouldn’t think of answering the question in terms of external causes. We would lamely and confusedly observe, “Because that’s who he is.” We wouldn’t think of suggesting that van Inwagen might not have been van Inwagen. Of course van Inwagen has the property of being himself and not something else. If he didn’t he wouldn’t be van Inwagen, and how could he not be himself? So of course he has that property. And for any non-meinongian having a property is equivalent to existing. So of course he exists: there’s no reason to think he might not have. What about Aquinas’s view that nonexistents are ideas or possibilities? Certainly Thomas has a vested interest in not doing away with contingency and it would appear at first that his model still leaves room for wondering why some things are extramental and actual, while others are merely mental and possible. Such wonder should then be able to spark the search for an explanation that can lead to God. In point of fact, however, Aquinas’s characterization of nonexistents as existing in the mind or power of some person still looks detrimental to the possible nonexistence of everyday objects. If we launch our cosmological argument by pointing out the contingency of the Parthenon, for instance, which implies that the Parthenon might not have existed, then, on the thomistic model, this is tantamount to beginning an argument by asking, “Why is the Parthenon not an idea in the mind?” Given the radical disparity between these two objects, the question doesn’t seem to burden us with any explanatory obligations. It’s like asking, “Why isn’t that mountain a blade of grass?” We wouldn’t look for a cause to answer that question, let alone a first cause. We’d be more likely to respond that a mountain isn’t a blade of grass because they are two entirely different things. So too the Parthenon or an atom or the universe itself is an entirely different thing from an idea in the mind, and we need not go further than to indicate that difference if we want to explain why the first three could not be reduced to the fourth.5 The same difficulty issues from saying that a nonexistent has existence in someone’s power. Suppose someone asserts that a given pot might not have existed, and then goes on to clarify that in such a case the pot would technically have existed, but only in the power of the potter. Now a potter’s ability to make pots consists in her (a) functioning body, (b) relevant acquired skills, (c) tools, and (d) raw materials. But under no conditions could any of the items in this

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catalogue be mistaken for a pot. So if “Why does this pot exist?” is equivalent to “Why is this pot not a functioning body, acquired pottery skills, tools and/ or raw materials?” then the answer is simply that it’s a different thing to be a pot and to be any of these other things singly or in combination. Clarification, not the causal explanation integral to the cosmological argument, is all that’s needed. The common denominator among non-meinongian theories is the denial of any possible distinction between being a thing and being an existing thing: esse res est esse ens. If there can be no existent that is not a thing and no nonexistent that is a thing, it means that to exist is simply to be something and not nothing and not something else. But in that case our reaction to learning that something exists should be exactly proportionate to our reaction at learning that something is a thing—we should respond with the same degree of wonder and curiosity. And that degree is, in fact, very low. We may be interested in the thing under consideration, the horse, the tree, the Queen of England, but we are not interested in why it is something and not nothing and not something else. We don’t walk outside late at night and look up at the sky and ask ourselves why the Queen of England isn’t a tree. We don’t look at a particular horse and wonder, in an existential moment, why it isn’t a not-horse. How could a horse be a not-horse? How could something not be something? How could a thing fail to be what it is? Among competing accounts of existence and nonexistence, meinongianism is the position most amenable to the proposal that things might not have existed, since on any other model not existing implies the awkward, if not incoherent, notion of a thing not being a thing or of a thing being something else entirely. But only if a thing might have been itself, and yet not existed, is its existence marvelous, and only if the existence of things is marvelous is there any motivation for postulating a universal cause to explain the marvel.

5

Perfection and Divine Existence

It’s probably unusual to argue, as I have, that meinongianism is implicitly tied up with presuppositions involved in the cosmological argument for God’s existence. But there’s nothing uncommon in noticing the apparent connection between meinongianism and the ontological argument. Often this apparent connection is acknowledged for the sake of disavowing any genuine connection; some insist that meinongianism doesn’t enable the ontological argument,1 while others insist that the ontological argument doesn’t presume any meinongian commitments.2 The insistence on both sides testifies to the intuition that sees the two ideas as complementary and even mutually implicating, and in this chapter I want to argue that the intuition, and not its dismissal, is correct. Before continuing, let me say explicitly what kind of ontological arguments I’ll be considering. Oppy (1995, 2006: 49–96) has taken pains to classify the various ontological arguments, which he characterizes as attempts to argue to God’s existence from a priori premises. Of these, I will only address those arguments which employ the idea of perfection (or greatness or excellence, etc.); thus, I will not deal with mereological or what Oppy calls “Hegelian” arguments, nor with modal arguments that do not rely on some kind of value-ascription. Nor, needless to say, am I talking about arguments like Thomas’s fourth way, since even though it references the idea of perfection or excellence, it does not (on my reading) seek to establish a strictly logical connection between perfection and existence, but instead appeals, like Aquinas’s other arguments, to the need for causal explanation.

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Perfection and (regular) existence Anselm’s original formulation muddies the waters a bit by distinguishing between whether a thing (a) exists only in the mind or (b) exists in reality as well as in the mind. Anselm might have meant several things by this distinction. He might, for instance, have meant that the same thing can be, at the same time, both an idea and a concrete, mind-independent reality. This, as I have already argued in Chapters 2 through 4, seems to me a clear category mistake. The mental configuration of a human mind is not the same kind of thing as—and so could not be identical to—a horse or an island or God.3 On the other hand, Anselm might have meant, and various commentators4 have taken him to mean, that something can be known whether it exists or not: It follows that Anselm is asking us to grant that even the fool understands a concept, and so it would seem that it is therefore of this entity that is predicated (in a typical scholastic fashion) “existence in the understanding.” But this conclusion is a bit hasty, because it brings about a rather absurd consequence, namely, that God is a concept. Hence, it seems that when Anselm speaks of something which is in the understanding, he is not exactly pointing to the sense of [the expression or concept] G, but rather to its reference. And the argument actually requires this, since Anselm wants to show that the very same object, which appears in a first moment as a pure object of the understanding, turns out to have also existence. (García de la Sienra 2000: 134)

I will therefore interpret Anselm’s “exists in the mind” as an idiom for “is an object of knowledge.” I will, furthermore, take his distinction to mean that a thing can (a) be an object of knowledge without existing, or (b) be an object of knowledge and exist. With this distinction in place, we can present the case. Every exposition of Anselm’s argument seems to have a different number of premises, with every objector seemingly taking issue with a different premise. Nonetheless, let me try to interpret the argument through a simple syllogism, and then see whether the more prominent objections against it can be met successfully by meinongian principles: P1: God is perfect P2: What is perfect exists C: God exists

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Beginning with the first premise, an anti-meinongian might begin the criticism by demanding that “God is perfect” only be accepted if it presupposes an existential conditional; thus, “If God exists, then God is perfect.” When we say a triangle has three sides, it’s claimed, we tacitly qualify the general assertion by appending “if it exists.” So too when we say “God is perfect,” we should add to ourselves, “if God exists.” The conclusion of the syllogism should therefore read “God exists, if God exists”—a trivial result befitting a fanciful argument.5 On the meinongian model, of course, we may say all kinds of unqualifiedly true things about objects, whether we know them to exist or not. As a matter of fact, it is precisely our insight into the character of those things that don’t exist or of whose existential status we’re unsure that allows us to say what they would be like if they existed. In other words, we can’t consistently claim that things have no properties unless they exist, and then go on to ascribe to them the property of being-such-if-they-were-to-exist. How do we know a triangle has three sides if it exists? Because we know what a triangle is, whether it exists or not. How do we know that God is perfect if he exists? Because we know what God is before we know whether he exists. The natural rejoinder will be simple rejection of the first premise. God does not exist, there is no such thing, and so there is nothing more to be said about him, including any specious attribution of perfection. “God” is thus relegated to the domain of meaninglessness. But this causes very little consternation to the proponent of the ontological argument, for we can easily do without the name “God” and still run the syllogism: P1*: That which is perfect is perfect P2: What is perfect exists C*: That which is perfect exists

After all, we can always apply the name “God” later on, and in the meantime the opponent of the ontological argument can’t take refuge in accusations of meaninglessness. Everyone should know more or less what “perfect” means, since it’s a word everyone uses. For the same reason the familiar accusation of question-begging loses its force. If perfection implies existence, and atheists and agnostics are unwilling to ascribe existence to God, then obviously they won’t be willing to grant the attribute of perfection to God in the premise of an argument whose purpose was to convince them that God existed in the

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first place. But “perfect” means nothing other than perfect, and so it does no good to object that what is perfect isn’t perfect. Again, since we use the word “perfect” with perfect facility, it presumes we know more or less what it refers to—whether existing or not existing. So, a tautology involving “perfect” should be unexceptionable as a premise by any user of ordinary language. Moving on to the second premise there are two traditional lines of opposition. The first is to reject the second premise on the grounds that it implies that existence is a property. The ontological argument we are considering rests on the possibility of comparing the same thing with existence and without it, the way someone might look at herself in a mirror while putting a hat on and taking it off again to see whether she looks better with the hat or without it. But, the objection goes, existence isn’t like a hat. It’s not one feature, one accessory that you can add to others. If you take away a person’s hat, the person is still there with all her other properties, but if you take away her existence there isn’t anything there at all. A person’s existence is just that person. If you get rid of her existence, you get rid of her; if you posit her existence, you posit her—you don’t posit her plus some other occult property. This seems to be roughly what Kant was getting at when, in attempting to refute the ontological argument, he declared that existence isn’t a determining predicate. Existence isn’t something that modifies something— it simply is that something. And if existence doesn’t modify something, then it can’t make that something more perfect. Kant several times puts his objection in terms of our ideas and what we can conceive: he says we don’t conceive of actual things as being different from possible things, and that “existence” adds nothing to our idea of a thing. Here I think Kant is guilty of confusing imagination/images and conception/ideas. As Descartes had already pointed out, there are things we can conceive of which we can’t imagine (like a hundred-sided geometric figure), and it seems likely that Kant, in noticing that we don’t imagine existing and nonexisting things differently, has gone on to make the completely unjustified claim that we don’t conceive of existing and nonexisting things differently. This is surely wrong: we may have the same picture in our minds of King Arthur whether we believe him to exist or not, but we can conceive what it means for him to exist and we know it’s different than if he’s purely fictional. We do have an idea of existence, which is why we know what the word “existence” means in the first place.

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And of course, on the meinongian account, existence is a property that some things have and others lack, and even though something requires existence to have existing properties, it doesn’t require existence to have any properties simpliciter. We needn’t rehash all the material from Part One on why meinongianism is a viable position, but it should be clear that it makes the ontological argument invulnerable to Kant’s notorious objection. For a meinongian something can be fully determinate and still receive the further determination of existing, just as an outfit can be fully determinate and still receive the further determination of a hat. So we can go ahead and make the comparison: is a thing better when it has existence than when it doesn’t? Which brings us to the second objection to the second premise: granted existence is a genuine property, had by some things and not by others, does it necessarily constitute an improvement? If a thing has a complete ensemble of properties before it exists, what makes it better when it has the additional feature of being real? To me this objection seems like asking what makes movies in full color better than movies in black and white, given that the movies in black and white are just as detailed as the color films. One could only answer that the color makes everything richer, more brilliant. One might wonder if the one asking were colorblind. Certainly filmmakers still occasionally make black and white movies for the sake of effect, but not because they themselves find nothing preferable about a universe with color to a universe without. Things that are real matter—whatever goodness they possess is made worthwhile, important, not to be neglected—because they exist. Things are better when they exist. The counterexample might be raised of undesirable things—things like sickness or death or a mortgage—which seem to be better precisely when they don’t exist, and in fact as soon as things like sicknesses or mortgages show up people instantly try to make them stop existing as soon as possible. But of course the traditional position, which we may call the evil as privation position, holds that what is responsible for our repugnance in these cases is not so much the fact that certain things exist as the fact that certain other things don’t. “Getting rid of sickness” is simply an idiom for trying to restore health, “delaying death” means prolonging life, and paying off a mortgage entails raising funds and gaining full ownership. In other words, overcoming

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evil always involves trying to bring about or maintain the existence of things, and this seems to support the idea of existence as an unqualified good. For those to whom the evil as privation thesis remains unconvincing, we can still salvage the second premise. I myself think existence always makes a thing better, but there’s no reason to suppose that this strong position is presupposed by the ontological argument. As has been remarked by several commentators, Anselm never claims that existence is a perfection generally, or that anything automatically becomes better just by existing. All Anselm says (roughly) is that what is unqualifiedly perfect is better if it exists, and this more modest principle seems much less open to controversy. Certainly it’s more plausible to say that something good, especially something unqualifiedly good, is better when it exists. It’s good for good to exist, and if it’s good for good to exist, then it’s good for the most good (i.e., perfection) to exist. The final classic objection to the ontological argument, and the one which most highlights its connection to meinongianism, is the claim that this line of reasoning can be employed to logically demonstrate the existence of all manner of ludicrous entities. So, Guanilo launched the tradition of parodies with his perfect island, and anti-meinongians have expressed concern that making existence a property would allow us to formulate phrases like “existing unicorn” or “existing round square” which would in turn force us to admit these fabulous and nonsensical items into our ontology. The standard answer to the perfect island parody points out that islands, by being islands, entail certain imperfections, such that, strictly speaking, (unqualifiedly) perfect islands aren’t legitimate, consistent objects (cf., Hartshorne [1941] 1964: 303). So too with any material, created, or non-divine thing, it is incongruous to pair it with the concept “perfect.” Even if we ask about “island-perfect” islands, the ambiguity remains. Does “island-perfect” mean all the perfections an island could have? If so, it’s not clear that there’s any definite limit to such a broad range of perfections, and so there’s nothing definite denoted by an island-perfect island. Or does “island-perfect” mean all the perfections an island should have? If so, it’s not clear that existence is a perfection due to any island. In each case, the parodies seem to suffer innate disabilities not present in the notion they’re intended to satirize. As far as phrases like “existing unicorn” or “existing round-square” go, we can say quite placidly that these phrases do not describe anything, since attempting

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to predicate anything of such subjects would imply the false proposition that unicorns exist or that squares could be round and exist (cf., Chapter 3). No thing is a round square, existing or otherwise, and no thing is a unicorn that exists—although there are any number of things which are nonexisting unicorns. A meinongian is not forced to accept that the conjunction of any two words signifies a genuine thing; the two words may signify essentially incompatible things, or the two words may, as in the case of “existing” and “unicorn,” signify two things which are compatible in principle but are not unified in fact.6 In both cases a meinongian can easily avoid commitment to patent falsehoods. Notice that the parodies are all generated by verbally joining multiple words or concepts that proponents of the ontological argument can claim do not refer to things joined in fact: a perfect island, an existent unicorn, or a necessarily existing imperfect thing. By contrast, the ontological argument highlights the referent of a single word, “perfect,” and contends that reflection on the referent of that word yields the insight that what doesn’t exist is less than perfect and so what is perfect can’t be what doesn’t exist. Therefore, what is perfect exists. Again, it might be tempting to claim that what is perfect is not something existing or nonexisting because “perfect” itself is an incoherent concept with no possible referent. But this is to groundlessly slander a word and concept with familiar everyday use, and such a resort looks bad for opponents of the ontological argument. We use “perfect” all the time, we know what it means, and if reflecting on that meaning leads us to conclude that what is perfect exists, then we can’t retroactively decide that the word was meaningless the whole time. The ontological argument, like meinongianism in general, is sometimes dismissed at the end by saying that if it tells us anything, it tells us only about the structure of our thoughts and speech. Talk about Sherlock Holmes is really talk about our talk about Sherlock Holmes, and if there is a sound a priori argument that that than which nothing greater can be thought exists, this just tells us that our notion of God is connected to the notion of existence. This kind of violent disassociation of thought and extramental things would, as I have already suggested, eviscerate philosophy entirely, and ultimately preclude any kind of rational codification of basic truths.7 We may, to take an example from a different logical field, claim that mathematics is a wholly conventional

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system with no extramental correlates, but if we go to sleep with eighty dollars on our hotel nightstand and wake up with only twenty dollars, we’ll probably institute inquiries. And we’ll be very dogmatic about the real world: we’ll tell the staff that there’s money missing. We won’t tell them that we’re bound to think and to say, due to our congenital human limitations, that eighty is more than twenty. We’ll say that we’re bound to think this way because things are this way. And so by extension if we’re bound to think of Sherlock Holmes a certain way, that’s because he is a certain way. And if we’re bound to think of perfection as existing, that’s because something is perfect and does exist. And that something we generally call “God.”

Perfection and necessary existence One variation of the ontological argument which is sometimes seen as originating in Anselm and sometimes in Descartes involves the attribution of necessary existence to God in addition to plain old regular existence. Norman Malcolm ([1960] 1965) is probably the first to clearly argue that necessary existence is a great improvement over plain existence in avoiding meinongian commitments. His case is basically this: while existence is considered ambiguous as a property and outright ineligible as a perfection to be superadded to a somehow prior group of properties, necessary existence (which comprises or entails features such as metaphysical independence, eternity, and indestructibility) is a much stronger candidate for the roles of both property and perfection. Necessary existence could be plausibly presented as a distinctive property—one thing might possess it and another not, whereas for non-meinongians either everything has existence or nothing has it. Also necessary existence is more manifestly a perfection—we prize diamonds for their durability and independent thinkers for their independence. Necessary existence, as the sum and substance of such properties, should certainly be understood as pertaining to the notion and nature of the perfect. We could, therefore, rework the entire syllogism as follows: P1*: That which is perfect is perfect P2*: What is perfect necessarily exists C **: That which is perfect necessarily exists

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And obviously what necessarily exists … exists. So God exists. I think this argument is sound, but I also think it entirely unsuccessful in avoiding meinongian implications. It additionally brings up the very touchy subject of necessity, some aspects of which will have to be discussed here. To begin with, what does it mean for a thing to have necessary existence? Many philosophers hold and have held that necessity cannot truly be ascribed to concrete things, but only to propositions. Necessity is purely a feature of linguistic structure (de dicto), not of things in themselves (de re). In the early twentieth century this view of necessity had become such a commonplace that Findley (1948) was content simply to cite the scholarly consensus as his evidence that “a necessary being” constituted an inherent absurdity. An older system for categorizing necessity which goes back at least to medieval logicians is between conditional (or “suppositional”) necessity and absolute necessity (cf., Aquinas, Summa theol. 1.19.3). It will, I think, be helpful to outline the four categories of necessity which emerge from these different pairings of necessity: First then, de dicto necessity, which generally places obligations on speakers not to contradict themselves. Conditional de dicto necessity delineates what a person cannot reasonably assert because two descriptions of a thing, either of which might be meaningfully applied to the thing by itself, are senseless when applied to the thing together. If I say the house is blue, I cannot, on pain of contradiction, say or imply that the house is not blue. There’s no contradiction in saying the house is blue, nor that the house is not blue, but I can’t consistently say both. Conditional de dicto necessity can moreover be violated without using multiple propositions, that is, when the terms used imply incompatible (but individually possible) states of affairs, for example, “The bachelor is getting a divorce,” or “The scar appeared spontaneously on his face.” Absolute de dicto necessity delineates what a person cannot reasonably assert because a description that might be meaningfully applied to something else is senseless when applied to the subject in question. It is distinct from conditional necessity because it does not make two individually conceivable but mutually incompatible claims about something, but only one inconceivable claim about one thing. Thus, “The bachelor is getting a divorce” implies two incompatible claims about the same man, namely, that he is unmarried and

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that he is married. Whereas “The square is round” or “The sound is noiseless” makes an inconceivable claim about a single subject. The key difference which takes us from conditional to absolute de dicto necessity lies in whether we’re able to change the subject-referent to avoid contradiction and yet still maintain that we’re talking about the same thing: thus, in cases of conditional necessity we can modify the problematic sentences to “The former bachelor is getting a divorce,” or “The mark appeared spontaneously on his face” (a scar is, by definition, a mark on the skin caused by a wound) and still feel we’re talking about the same man or mark. Whereas if we change the word describing the subject-referent in cases where we wish to remove the absolute contradiction, we’re no longer talking about the same thing. If we say “The circle is round,” we’re no longer talking about the same shape as we were when we were talking about the square. A man can change from a bachelor into a husband and still be the same man, but a shape can’t change from square to round and still be the same shape, nor a sound become noiseless and still be itself. It’s natural to suppose that the distinction between the de dicto versions of conditional and absolute necessity expresses our recognition of the distinction between essential properties and non-essential properties. “The square is round” isn’t making two claims which individually, under certain conceivable conditions, might truly apply to the individual subject in question. If the thing is a square, then “is round” could never be a true description of it under any circumstances. It just couldn’t be round, even though a bachelor could have gotten himself married. The square might be erased and a circle substituted, but no such annihilation happens when a man goes from being a bachelor to a husband. The mark that is a scar could have been caused by genes, but the sense-datum that is a sound couldn’t have been a color. So we can characterize the de re aspect of conditional necessity as consisting in a thing’s possession of certain non-essential properties. A thing can’t have a non-essential property, which it also lacks (the cake can’t be eaten and had at the same time), but there’s nothing in its core constitution that requires it to possess the property or lack it. And once we acknowledge (de dicto) a thing’s possession of a non-essential property, we can’t deny the possession without self-correction. The de re aspect of absolute necessity consists in a thing’s possession of certain essential properties, and forms the basis of de dicto absolute necessity.

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“A rectangle is angular” is true by definition because it is of the essence of a rectangle to be angular. We know that roundness is impossible for a square because we know what a square is, and not simply because linguistic conventions or previous verbal commitments discourage speaking in certain ways. And because the word means the thing, you cannot contradict what the thing is without contradicting what the word means. Which is why the phrase “The round square” is self-contradictory. Now given that the reformed version of the ontological argument stresses the necessary existence of that which is perfect (which, for now, I’ll just call “God”), which form of necessity is it attributing to God? Obviously not de dicto necessity—proponents of the argument want to say something about God, not about words about God. So does God’s existence have conditional de re necessity, or absolute de re necessity? Again, traditional theists don’t believe that God just happens to exist, as though in principle God’s nonexistence would have been equally possible. They want to say that under no circumstances could God have failed to exist. Thus, nonexistence is absolutely impossible for God, which means that God possesses existence as an essential property.8 Some philosophers will take issue with this presentation of necessity: they will say that our convictions about both essence and necessity can be reduced to our insights about possible worlds. Thus, to say that something is necessary is just to say that it is so in all possible worlds, and to say that a thing has an essential property is just to say that it has that property in all possible worlds (often “where it exists” is added as a proviso). But the “possible worlds” idiom was originally contrived as a means of conveniently expressing modal statements, and modal statements, as we have seen, are linguistic expressions of our insights about when a thing possesses essential and non-essential properties. In other words, those who want to ground modality and essence in terms of possible worlds are, as Lowe (2008: 34) says, putting the cart before the horse. As a matter of fact it’s precisely in discussions of necessary existence where one sees how “possible worlds” talk gets out of hand when not tethered to essences. It’s sometimes claimed (cf., Leftow 1989: 137) that necessary existence simply asserts that an object exists in every possible world, without implying anything at all about what kind of object the object in question is. Paul Gould (2014) distinguishes between “scope necessity” (existing in all possible worlds)

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and “nature necessity” (existence as an inherent feature) claiming that the first tells us nothing about the second. But what on earth could prompt anyone to declare that an object existed in all possible worlds unless she had some insight into the kind of thing she was talking about? If a platonist thinks abstract objects exist in all possible worlds, it’s because she has a conviction about the kind of things abstract objects are. If a calvinist thinks sin exists in all possible worlds where human beings exist, it’s because she has a conviction about the kind of thing sin is and the kind of things human beings are. If a theist thinks God exists in all possible worlds, it’s because she has a conviction about the kind of thing God is. We don’t consider the structures of possible worlds before we think about the natures of individual things; the order of experience plainly goes in the opposite direction. Possible worlds modeling, like modal language, is based on insight into essence. Relevantly for the ontological argument, if we don’t know what perfection is, and what existence is, we won’t have any confidence is saying that “perfection” is even meaningful or that necessary existence would contribute to perfection. Back to meinongianism: if “God has necessary existence” or “God exists necessarily” ultimately signifies that God possesses existence as an essential property, then there has been no evasion of meinongianism. Existence is still a property possessed by God essentially and by creatures non-essentially.9 Which is just as well, since if necessary existence were something radically different than existence, it’s not clear what it could be, nor whether we’d mean anything intelligible by saying that God exists (cf., Henle [1961] 1965). The only way the ontological argument works is if everything except God can be conceived of as not existing, since everything except God possesses or fails to possess existence non-essentially. God, however, that which is unqualifiedly perfect, cannot fail to possess existence and any statement to the contrary is to contradict the very meaning of the word “God” or “perfect.”10 If, on the other hand, existence is made a prerequisite for the possession of properties, then the proviso “if it exists,” already discussed at the beginning of this chapter, will be extended to all claims about essences as well as to other kinds of property ascriptions. Thus, “a triangle essentially has three sides” will be interpreted as meaning “if a triangle exists, then it cannot fail to have three sides.” But, in that case existence will belong essentially to everything that has any essential properties. Fine, in a very different context, states:

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For what drives us to submit the property of being a man to the conditional criterion [i.e., “if it exists”] is the belief that it is impossible for something to be a man without existing. It would then seem to follow that the property of being an existent man should also submit to the conditional criterion; for this latter property merely makes explicit the existential commitment which is implicit in the former property. Granted that Socrates is essentially a man, we should therefore accept that Socrates is essentially an existent man. (Fine 1994: 7)

If “x possesses P essentially” just means “if x exists then x cannot fail to have P,” then clearly x possesses existence essentially, since if x exists then, obviously, x cannot fail to exist. And if this is all we mean by essentially, or de re necessity, then everything with an essence will be essentially existent. In which case essential or necessary existence will not be a distinguishing feature of what is perfect. To summarize, if we don’t think things have essential properties then we won’t have a basis for subscribing to de re necessity, and hence we won’t have a basis for supposing that anything exists by de re necessity. In which case, no necessarily existing God. On the other hand, if we think existence is a prerequisite for other properties, then anything with essential properties will also have existence essentially, in which case nothing can be proven about the necessity of God’s existence that cannot also be proven about the existence of any other kind of thing. So things have to be able to have essential properties without also having existence—that is, meinongianism must be presupposed— for the “necessary existence” version of the ontological argument to work. Before concluding this section, we have to contend with an attempt by Christian platonism to anticipate and neutralize any felt need for meinongian principles. Recognizing, as (again) almost everyone does, that the ontological argument initially seems to require some kind of meinongianism, Plantinga proposes the following strategy: I am inclined to think the supposition that there are such things—things that are possible but don’t in fact exist—is either unintelligible or necessarily false. But this doesn’t mean that the present version of the ontological argument must be rejected. For we can restate the argument in a way that does not commit us to this questionable idea. Instead of speaking of possible beings that do or do not exist in various possible worlds, we may speak of

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properties and the worlds in which they are or are not instantiated. Instead of speaking of the possible fat man in the corner, noting that he doesn’t exist, we may speak of the property being a fat man in the corner, noting that it isn’t instantiated (although it could have been). Of course, the property in question, like the property being a unicorn, exists. (Plantinga 1974b: 110)

Plantinga doesn’t want to use “God” as the subject of his premise or “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” or “what is (unconditionally) perfect,” since on a non-meinongian model making claims about such items assumes in advance that they exist, which would in turn constitute flagrant question-begging. So instead of saying anything about “That which has maximal greatness,” he proposes to talk about the existing property denoted by “has maximal greatness.” Instead of saying “That which has maximal greatness is possible,” he uses as a premise “Maximal greatness is possibly exemplified” (Plantinga 1974a: 214): 1. The property has maximal greatness entails the property has maximal excellence in every possible world. 2. Maximal excellence entails omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection. 3. Maximal greatness is possibly exemplified. The formulation is fine, but insofar as it talks about possible property exemplification, it can’t get away from talking about the possible thing that exemplifies that property. What Plantinga means by “the exemplification of a property” is just the possession of that property by some existing thing. Moreover, the property maximal greatness is clearly equivalent to the property divinity. So by Plantinga’s standards, to say “maximal greatness is possibly exemplified” is just to say “it is possible for something to possess divinity and to exist,” which in turn is just to say, “it is possible that God exists.” Which is, of course, equivalent to saying, “God is possible.” In which case it couldn’t be much clearer that we’re talking about God, whose character the first two premises go on to describe in greater detail. Consequently, unless we can legitimately describe something that doesn’t exist, the ontological argument, even as Plantinga formulates it, will rely on a question-begging premise.

Part Three

Nonexistence and Creatures

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Ex Nihilo and Nonexistence

The Judeo-Christian notion that the universe was created by God “out of nothing” came into sharp relief during the first centuries of Christianity and was defined in conscious contrast to the hellenic view that some elemental substrate preceded and lent itself to the formation of the familiar material world.1 The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was explicitly opposed to this platonic and neoplatonic notion of available raw matter that is somehow prior to creation and out of which creation emerges. In responding to the “pre-existent matter” model, the ex nihilo tradition developed thematically from Theophilus, Tertullian, and Irenaeus and spread throughout the patristic era until it became for centuries the established doctrine of the Christian world.2 The basic rationale for saying that God makes the world out of nothing is that the alternative to endorsing the creatio ex nihilo seems to involve affirming that God makes the world out of something that already exists. Out of what? Either out of God or out of something other than God. But if there is something other than God, something uncreated, some primordial, existing, non-divine given, then God is not the ultimate reality. Everything is reducible to God and matter or to God and chaos or to God and some kind of positive void. More than this, God’s being, sovereignty, and immensity are compromised by running up against the limit of this equally basic principle of all things. The classical attributes of divinity all weaken, and the act of creation itself becomes nothing more than the restructuring of what is already there. After all, anybody can make new things using raw materials, so there wouldn’t seem to be anything special about God doing it. Not surprisingly, some contemporary theologians are quite pleased to dispense with the creatio ex nihilo precisely in order to undercut divine

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attributes like omnipotence (cf., for instance, Griffin 2001), but once we begin tampering with the traditional conception of God it quickly becomes unclear whether much of God’s character can survive. In any case, I will presume that most theists will wish, both for confessional and for philosophical reasons, to preserve God’s traditional attributes and to uphold the doctrine that before creation (taking “before” in its metaphysical and logical sense) nothing existed other than God. On the other hand, if creation is made out of God, then it appears we have a recurrence of the emanationist problem. If everything is God and comes from God, there seems little room for the existence of finite things in their own right. Divine unfolding and self-expression can’t be identified with creation anymore than a boy’s self-development to manhood can be identified with his manufacture of an artifact. Granted the branches of pantheism, emanationism, and process theology come in many varieties and boast different justifications, at the end of the day none seems to allow for anything other than God. So creation is non de deo sed ex nihilo. The doctrine of ex nihilo thus serves both to preserve God’s absolute, sovereign character, and to differentiate the created and uncreated orders. It also indicates that the universe’s past does not extend infinitely backward. Beyond a certain point in the past there was (or is, on some B-theories of time) nothing in existence but God. All this is thoroughly consonant with the orthodox conception of the monotheistic God. It does, however, carry with it serious philosophical challenges, which can be stated in several complementary forms.

Nonexistent otherness and creation The first and most basic expression of the problem can be put by asking where the world can come from if it is preceded only by God. Ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing), so if creatures don’t come from God, and they don’t come from anything else, it seems their existence remains unexplained. Put differently, if nothing is added to God—not chaos, not prime matter, not anything at all—in order to bring about creation, how can there be anything besides God? One would expect that the product of God alone plus nothing

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would equal God alone, but instead it looks as though the product of God alone plus nothing adds up to God and the world together. Ironically, it appears that by making God the only thing to precede creation we have prevented God from being an adequate explanation for creation—which is one of the primary philosophical appeals of theism in the first place. A second expression of the problem is to put the issue in terms of causality; how can causality work when there is no patient upon which the cause can act? Bede Rundle (2004: 44–94) has argued that every kind of causality in our experience involves the cause acting on some patient, and that this agency is precisely what produces the effect. Thus, in all causation there is A (the agent) acting on B (the patient) to produce some state of affairs C (the effect). If this same structure is absent in creation, then it becomes uninformative to describe such an event as causal in the first place: A sculptor creates a statue by chipping away at a block of marble. When God supposedly created the universe, there was nothing that had the role of the marble, and no act analogous to the chipping. Given the complete absence of any transformation, modification, or reorganization in creation ex nihilo, our understanding of this notion can hardly profit from our understanding of causation. (Rundle 2004: 78)

How can we know the difference, asks Rundle, between mere sequence and causation, unless there is something connecting the cause to the effect? If one event follows another, what evidence do we have that one event causes the other unless there is some intermediary point of contact between the first and the second event? But that point of contact is conspicuously absent, he claims, in creatio ex nihilo—there’s nothing there which can provide the bridge between God’s efficiency and the effect (Rundle 2004: 64, 79–80). Finally, the issue can be put in terms of change. One would think that creation—the event in which the state of affairs where God alone exists is supplanted by the state of affairs in which God exists and creatures exists— would constitute a change, indeed, the most colossal change in all of history. And yet theistic philosophers as diverse as Aquinas (Summa theol. 1.45.3) and Copan and Craig (2004: 158)—relying on Aristotle’s insight that a change must involve a stable subject which is continuously present before, during, and after the change—have declared that creation is not a change at all. Why not? Because there is, so they argue, no subject of the change. And with no subject it

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is presumed that there can be no change. God is the one who causes, but does not undergo, creation—God is therefore disqualified as the subject. Creatures, on the other hand, do not exist prior to creation and so it is assumed that they cannot serve as a point of continuity between not-existing and existing.3 What all these difficulties have in common is the concern that unless something other than God factors into the mix of creation, there simply isn’t enough to account for the diversification of reality into God and creatures, for God’s causal role in creation, or for the change from God alone to God and creatures together. And yet on the traditional view nothing other than God exists prior to creation. At this point the theistic advantages of meinongianism cry out for recognition. But before going over those advantages in detail, let me briefly deal with the objection that meinongianism itself goes against the doctrine of ex nihilo, and so far from resolving issues on behalf of that doctrine instead undermines it to the point of flat contradiction. After all, the teaching is that God created the universe out of nothing, not out of some occult stock of nonexistent things. If nonexistents are something, as meinongians most definitely claim them to be, then they are plainly not nothing, and so cannot be invoked by proponents of creatio ex nihilo as a kind of ground of creation alongside God. We may respond by simply observing that “nothing” is by no means an unambiguous word, and that without careful distinctions its employment can lead to all kinds of nonsense, as Raymond Smullyan’s infamous ham sandwich syllogism (i.e., Nothing is better than heaven; a ham sandwich is better than nothing; therefore a ham sandwich is better than heaven) illustrates. Augustine, in struggling with the “nothing” involved in creation, plays with the idea of “a nothing-something,” or “an is-is-not” (Augustine 1960: 308). The point is that we can’t take the “nothing” in ex nihilo as having a wholly transparent significance—we have to ask what the nihilo expresses in this particular case. Now the authorities to which the early proponents of creatio ex nihilo always appealed were certainly biblical, and among the relevant passages some are clearly less supportive than others. For instance, it has become a commonplace to observe that Genesis 1, prima facie at least, does not explicitly contain the doctrine of ex nihilo. Quite the contrary, it references a primordial chaos or void or even mysterious “waters.” This is not to claim that the first chapter

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of the Bible contradicts an ex nihilo reading,4 only that it is not the explicit source for that doctrine. The three clearest sources for creatio ex nihilo are the following: II Maccabees 7:28: “Look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed.” John 1:3: “All things came into being by him; and apart from him nothing came into being that has come into being.” Romans 4:17: “In the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”

Insofar as these passages express the principle of creatio ex nihilo, they do it by affirming that creation is made neither out of God, nor out of any other pre-existent thing.5 The “nothing” should therefore be understood to mean “nothing existing.” There is no indication that the biblical doctrine excludes the notion that nonexisting things were involved in creation—in fact, the passage from Romans seems to imply that it was precisely nonexistent objects that God targeted by calling them into existence. Of course someone who is already convinced that meinongian objects are spurious will consistently claim that Paul is simply using a figure of speech, but in any case it is clear that the sources from which the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is derived do not explicitly rule out meinongianism in principle. The compatibility between the two must be settled on other grounds. And if those other grounds regard philosophical complementarity, then the compatibility between meinongianism and creatio ex nihilo seems to be very profound. Take the last of the aforementioned difficulties associated with the position that before creation nothing but God existed: the state of affairs after creation is vastly different than that prior to it, which seems to describe the essential features of a change—and yet since no subject exists to undergo the change, a change supposedly cannot be said to have occurred. But if meinongianism is true then we may satisfy our intuitions that creation is a change for finite things, and compare the conditions of finite things before and after they are caused to exist. Prior to creation (metaphysically and logically, if not temporally), all things other than God are nonexistents, well-defined things with a great variety of properties, existence being perhaps the most notable absentee. At creation, a certain assortment of finite things undergoes

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a change whereby they are bestowed with existence, and become creatures. Aristotle held, and common sense seems to agree, that in every change a continuous subject is required either to acquire or to lose some property, and meinongianism allows us to say that certain things received a new property at creation. Creatio ex nihilo apart from meinongianism seems to imply that nothing changes for the universe at the moment when everything comes into being (since there is no prior state of the universe which would be different from its created state). Meinongianism thus gives us the language needed to express how creation makes a difference for creatures. If nonexistents are legitimate objects in their own right, then we can also address Rundle’s objection that there is no point of impact between God and creatures that would justify characterizing that impact in causal terms. The cause, A, must act upon the patient, B, in order to produce effect, C. Unless the cause is acting upon something to produce the effect, there seems no motivation for saying that the relationship between A and C is causal rather than sequential. This poses little logical trouble for the meinongian theist; the patient, in the case of creation, is the collection of nonexistent objects nominated by God for existence. The state of affairs resulting from God’s causal impact on certain nonexistents is the resulting existence of those same objects. I am certainly not pretending to provide a logistical description of how such an event takes place in detail (How does God directly target nonexistents? What would such an action look like?) but it should be clear that there is no logical trouble, and certainly no analogical trouble, in characterizing such an event as a kind of causation. God gives being to nonexistents, and those same nonexistents come to be. Finally, we come to the most basic dilemma of creatio ex nihilo: how can adding nothing to God yield God plus a world? “When creating became a zerosum notion, with all the activity placed on God’s side of the ledger, it became difficult to find a place for the otherness of creation alongside God in the rest of the narrative” (Vail 2015: 57). How can we end up with anything other than God unless we start with something other than God? But if nonexistent objects are genuine, knowable, and creatable things, then diversity is a fact even before creation. Before creation it was true that unicorns didn’t exist. Before creation it was also true that particles and planets and people didn’t exist. Before creation, only God existed, but not only God was something. Differentiation between God and finite things therefore precedes creation.

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This is not to suggest that nonexistents are the cause of diversity in creation. Nonexistents cannot cause anything in the real world, as has already been pointed out several times. Rather, the diversity of non-divine things consists in those things simply being the things they are—they are not each other and they are not God; they are themselves. The diversity of creation is caused by God electing to admit a selection of non-divine things into the real world. God is therefore still the cause of the diversity in creation, and God is the sole cause of there being real things other than God. But those same things were other than God before they were made real. If the preceding is accurate, then it confirms the particular model of theism which holds that creatures do not of themselves make a difference to God. For Aquinas, the relation between creator and creatures is one-sided—creatures have a real relation to God, a relation such that God has a causal impact on them, while they have no causal impact on God. To illustrate this uneven arrangement, Aquinas offers several examples of one-sided relations. For instance, human knowledge: when I learn about the planet Jupiter, Jupiter is having a causal effect on my mental state, but my mental state isn’t having any causal effect on Jupiter. Another example is that of “right” and “left”: I can stand by a perfectly rounded marble column and say truly that the column is on my right, but it would be unmeaning to say that I was positioned on the rounded column’s left side since a rounded column has no front and therefore no left or right (cf., Aquinas, de Pot. 7.10). So too, if nonexistent things can have no causal impact, they can’t make a difference to God in creation for the simple reason that they have no real status until God creates them. Thus, the onesided relation—God makes a difference to creatures, but creatures don’t make a difference to God. It may be, certainly, that God’s decision to create makes a difference to God—God chooses to have a different experience by creating, directs the divine intellect and will differently than they would otherwise have been directed—but the divine decision to create is logically and ontologically prior to creatures, and therefore if there is any difference to God it is due to God’s decision and not to the causally effete (in reality) nonexistents. What about once creatures exist? Do they determine God’s knowing and willing then? Not on the meinongian model I’m proposing. For it is precisely God’s intelligent selection of certain things that makes them existing creatures. So it isn’t that God’s intellect and will are determined by the existence of

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creatures, but rather that the existence of creatures is determined by God’s intellect and will (the obvious apparent counterexample is human free choices, which will be addressed in the final two chapters). No one pretends to have removed all mysteriousness from the notion of creation. The event is still wholly unimaginable, and will remain so. The concern here is to prevent it from being incoherent. So far, however, a meinongian description of creation has offered a robust characterization of divine omnipotence and omniscience tied closely to a biblically consonant account of creatio ex nihilo. It has also gone a long way toward preserving the traditional doctrine about God—that God alone existed before creation, and yet that creatures are not simply a development of the divine nature—and preserves these two very difficult doctrines in harmonious balance. Meinongian theism provides a clear interpretation of the “nothing” in ex nihilo: we are not committed to the paradoxical positions that there was a something before creation that was also a nothing, or that there existed a zone of nonexistence. The nihil signifies “nothing that existed,” while the things that did not exist provide the otherness that God was able to transform into distinct, causally dependent entities. These are not inconsequential gains to traditional theism.

Creation of abstract objects? Finally, what implications does our account of creation have for the whole question of abstract objects? What is the proper description, on meinongian theism, of the relations between the triad of God, concrete creatures, and those incorrigible philosophical intangibles like properties, numbers, universals, tropes, propositions, and so on? Should these latter items be added to nonexistent things as part of the logical framework preceding creation, or does meinongianism render abstract objects superfluous altogether? Let us take the issue of essences as a paradigmatic example. As I argued earlier, if things don’t have essences, then they don’t have essential features, and if they don’t have essential features, then it would be possible for them to lose every single feature—thus being completely different—and still be the same thing. This is intolerable: if the notion of “being completely different” excludes anything, surely it excludes “being the same.” Therefore everything,

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to be the thing it is, must have an essence. It would seem, then, that over and above the individual—who comprises a collection of essential and nonessential features—there is that individual’s essence. More than this, certain truths seem to be timelessly and necessarily true, for example, two plus two equals four, a square cannot be round, and things identical to the same thing are identical with each other. The truth of these propositions doesn’t seem to depend on contingent factors; therefore, it appears that they are true in virtue of something other than the concrete, contingent entities of our quotidian experience. All this makes it very difficult to adopt a fictionalist/nominalist strategy that would simply dismiss all non-concrete objects as bogus reifications of linguistic or conceptual elements. There seem to be natures, common natures, and timeless truths, and we can’t eradicate reference to such items from our thinking and speech, which means that to dismiss it all as an illusion emerging from the inherent structure of thought and language is to simply cast aspersions on our thought and language. Such a move clarifies nothing, solves nothing, and threatens to lead down the rabbit hole to extreme skepticism; in the end, it’s equivalent to opting out of the project of making sense of experience.6 Christian platonists, on the other hand, hold that since there are necessary and timeless truths, there must exist certain objects that propositions expressing such truths accurately describe. But if such objects exist, and if they moreover exist necessarily and eternally, what is their relationship to God, who is traditionally identified as the only necessary, eternal being? Van Inwagen, in “God and Other Uncreated Things” (2009a), has bitten the bullet and decided simply that when traditional theism declares God to be the only eternal and necessary being, and everything else in existence to have been created by him at or after a certain point in time, the declaration should be interpreted as a technical imprecision. Abstract objects aren’t meant to be included in the scope of universal quantifications like “all things visible and invisible,” and calling God the eternal and necessary being should be understood as having the added qualifier “concrete”—God is the only eternal, necessary, non-abstract entity, but there are plenty of other things out there which can boast eternity and necessity apart from concreteness.7 Now that makes plenty of Christian philosophers uncomfortable, both for philosophical and for theological reasons. The philosophical discomfort has

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to do with the untidiness of positing a great expanse populated with separate, independent, causally effete, existing, abstract things. It feels something like having an enormous closet in one’s home with a “Miscellaneous” sign on the door. I’ll come back to that. Keeping the focus on theological considerations for now, if the panoply of abstract objects gets admitted into the circle of necessary and eternal beings, a natural worry is that God could get lost in the endless crowd of properties, numbers, propositions, relations, relations between groups of relations, propositions about groups of propositions, properties possessed by groups of properties, numbers numbering groups of numbers, etc. Nor are eternity and necessity the only divine attributes that platonism broadly distributes to countless other real things—it seems God will have to share infinity as well. Depending on how “absolute,” “ultimate,” and “unconditional” are construed, plenty of not-God things might get to share these titles too. Omnipotence is also cause for concern. If all these Platonic objects exist, and exist necessarily, and necessarily have the character they have, then there’s nothing God can do about them. Far from being omnipotent, God exercises power over a tiny percentage of reality. Again, one can simply accept this conclusion and portray God’s sovereignty as the ability to affect or control only a narrow sliver of existing things—the sliver comprising our universe—but it certainly begins to feel as though God is diminishing by the moment. In an effort to bring abstract objects back under God’s bailiwick, some theists have argued absolute creationism, which proposes that God is the cause of the platonic realm as well as of the concrete order. So triangularity, redness, and the number fifty-two all owe their existence to God, and not only their existence, but their very character. The number fifty-two wouldn’t exist, and it wouldn’t be less than fifty-three, unless God had made both of them. This is where the discussion appears to take an unappealing turn toward what Plantinga (1980) has called universal possibilism, the idea that what we take as impossibilities or necessities are really just the results of God’s decisionmaking.8 Descartes notoriously wrote that God might have made it untrue that four times two equals eight, or might have made it untrue that contradictories could not be true together—such is the divine omnicompetence (discussed and cited in Plantinga 1980: 100–101). Not surprisingly, few contemporary theists want to endorse theistic universal possibilism, since it seems to allow

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for contradictions which would eventually estrange us from any confidence in God’s goodness, truth, or even existence (cf., Plantinga 1980: 126). Some hope to make abstract objects dependent on God’s creative activity without descending into universal possibilism. The strategy is as follows: suppose numbers and natures and properties are all freely caused by God. Skeptics ask, “Then could God have made different numbers or natures, or made numbers or natures different than they are? Could God have made six to be more than seven, or could he have made the celebrated round square?” One might answer that since the notion of possibility is tied to abstract objects, to ask about what God could do (i.e., what was possible for God) prior to the creation of abstract objects is a category mistake. Before the creation of abstract objects the notions of possibility and impossibility don’t apply. From Morris and Menzel: If the claim that God could have created a different framework is supposed to have purchase for its modal element outside the framework which alone, according to the activist [i.e., proponent of the view that abstract objects are the product of divine intellective activity], grounds all modal claims, then it will be categorized by the activist as a malformed claim, conceptually false at best. There is no Archemidean point outside the actual conceiving activity of God from which we could judge it to be possible that God conceive a framework different from the one which, in fact, and of necessity, gives us all possibility and all necessity. (1986: 357)

The argument is that it doesn’t make sense to talk about what God “could have done” or what God “couldn’t have done,” since the natures which correspond to objective modal discourse aren’t operative before God actually creates them. We can’t coherently speak about the possibilities available to God before the bearers of possibility are themselves in existence. There is, on this view, something misleading about representing God as having various eternal options, some of which are selected for possibility (the abstract objects God creates) and reality (the concrete objects God creates). There are no such options—there is only God creating possibility and reality. In McCann’s pithy declarative: “‘Could have’ has nothing to do with what goes on in creation” (McCann 2012: 212). But if “could have” has nothing to do with creation, then it seems impossible to affirm that God “could have” done things differently—any way God desired, in fact—which is, of course, what most people mean by omnipotence. Or how

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can we say that God created freely, out of sheer generosity, when the notion of God-possibly-not-creating is mere logical confusion? Apart from the absence of external constraint, which isn’t nearly enough to reach even the minimal orthodox notion of freedom, we naturally conceive freedom as the possibility of not choosing as one has in fact chosen. As we have already had occasion to note in a somewhat different context, the very contingency of creation becomes a hollow concept without the possibility of the nonexistence of created things (whether abstract “creatures” or concrete things). We can’t have it both ways: if God creates possibility, then either God was free to have done the impossible (e.g., made contradictions true), or God wasn’t free at all.9 There’s one more non-meinongian option for dealing with God and abstract objects, namely, to say that abstract objects somehow exist timelessly within God, as a part or aspect of the divine essence. Generally this in-God model of abstract objects takes the form of conceptualism, associated most prominently with Augustine10 and Aquinas,11 wherein the platonic forms are cast as divine ideas, existing eternally within the divine mind. The trouble begins as soon as we inquire about how many ideas there are in God’s mind. Aquinas makes it plain that in themselves the “ideas” are, in fact, not plural—they are instead simply the divine essence. Since every creature participates in or imitates God to some finite degree, we refer, says Thomas, to the divine essence as the “divine ideas” to express the fact that the divine nature can be creatively participated in/imitated in any number of ways.12 Thus, the eternal idea of a human being and the eternal idea of an angel are simply the same divine essence, which can become the cause of angels or humans. This is obviously counterintuitive. How can the idea of a human and the idea of an angel be the same thing in any context? To know the difference between creating an angel and creating a human being, God must recognize what an angel is and what a human being is, and in so doing God cannot help but know that neither is identical to what God is (cf., Plantinga 1980: 37–38). More precisely, if there is nothing but the divine essence, and there are not differences within it, how can there be different ways in which it can be imitated and presented? What are these “different ways” which “are there” even though there’s no difference whatsoever? How can God know what an angel or what a man is when God only knows that which is neither of them? How can God know any differences—including the difference between a man and

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an angel—if there are no differences in what he knows, that is, the radically simple divine essence?13 Suppose instead that we postulate abstract objects as existing distinctly and in large quantity in the divine mind. If the natures and numbers and properties of concrete, created things existed eternally as different aspects of the divine essence, then it seems proper to understand creation as the actualizing of what is already present potentially in God. Such a view runs contrary to the scholastic characterization of God as pure actuality, but more worrisome is the way it portrays creation. Far from actualizing other things, God is simply actualizing different aspects of himself: There is, if you like, too much closeness between the divine idea and the created object to allow the created object enough room to be itself … There is something prior to the creation of Adam, namely the complete specification of Adam that is perfectly formed in God’s mind. If there is this perfectly determinate conception of Adam it is hard to see exactly what God’s creation is all about and why it is so amazing. (Robson 2008: 15) Does God really create “others” with “profound centres” or is He really only responding to aspects of Himself? It is hard to deny that God’s contemplation of the copies of His own ideas is only a contemplation of little (somewhat dimmed) reflections or duplications of Himself. There is no genuine other. (Robson 2008: 137)

Regardless of whether there are many ideas in God or only one, if creation is just the actualization of the divine ideas then creation is nothing other than God’s self-actualization. To summarize: abstract objects (a) if left outside and independent of God threaten the distinctiveness of the divine attributes; (b) if made dependent on God’s creative will result either in universal possibilism or in the negation of God’s freedom; (c) if made entities in God’s mind, their actualization in creation makes creatures nothing more than God’s selfdevelopment and self-actualization, and jeopardizes the crucial distinction between God and creatures so central to traditional theism. Whereas if meinongianism already gives the best framework for an ex nihilo creation account of concrete objects, then the difficulties surrounding God and abstract objects become much less acute. The timeless truths about numbers and properties and natures hold good before such numbers and properties and natures come to exist. Horses are quadrupeds, and have all the other essential

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equine qualities, before God causes certain horses to exist. Nonexistent men are rational before there are any real men (I am again using “before” in the logical/metaphysical, not temporal, sense). Ten is less than twenty before ten things or twenty things exist. I myself generally favor the aristotelian model of natures and properties, according to which they inhere in the individuals who instantiate them, but doubtless those who for whatever reason insist on separable properties or numbers or whatever can be easily accommodated— the point is that the timeless, necessary truths that lead to the postulating of an ideal realm of timeless, necessary existents can much more comfortably be made to describe the realm of fictional objects.14 Nonexistents don’t threaten God’s distinctiveness as the only independent, eternal, necessary being for the simple reason that none of them are beings— and if they do become beings, they become so temporally and contingently due to the divine will. God doesn’t determine their character (hence there is no trouble with universal possibilim15), but decides in perfect freedom which, if any, of the horde of nonexistents to bring into being. Here as before, the need to have an otherness which God can actualize, but which does not threaten the uniqueness of the divine nature, can best be met by a meinongianism system. I see no more plausible way to resolve all the objections posed against creation ex nihilo.

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Infinite Existence and Countless Nonexistents

If, as I argued in Chapter 5, meinongian principles can aid in clarifying the logical connections between perfection and existence, then presumably they should also facilitate the same implication in the opposite direction. A perfect, existing thing is the conclusion of reflection on the nature of perfection, and perhaps the same thing can be deduced by thinking about the nature of existence. What is existence? A meinongian distinguishes herself by maintaining that existence is a property possessed by some things and not by others. So, let us assume that existence is something: it’s a property, and when things have it they exist, and when they don’t have it they don’t exist. Next question: does existence exist? One might be inclined to answer in the negative, given how many properties don’t parallel the items that have them. The property “running” doesn’t run—it’s the animal, which instantiates running, that runs—so shouldn’t we say that the entity, and not the “being” which the entity instantiates, is? The property “clumsy” isn’t clumsy—it’s the clumsy server who can’t keep the tray level who is clumsy—so why not say that only real things exist, while existence doesn’t? The problem is that if we say existence doesn’t exist, then we’d better have some idea of what it means for a property not to exist. As we’ve seen, the platonic model of properties presents them all as existing, and as existing necessarily, in which case it would be particularly bizarre to insist on a single exception by saying that the only property to not exist is existence itself. Meinongianism, on the other hand, more generous in acknowledging what’s not there, is readier to grant that certain properties don’t exist. The reader may recall from Chapter 3 that a nonexisting property was there

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defined as a property which can be genuinely possessed but is not really possessed. More specifically, a nonexisting property is a property that can characterize nonexisting things, even though it does not characterize the way an existing thing is in the real world. Thus, being-a-dragon is a nonexisting property, since it can characterize nonexisting things (like Smaug or Fafnir), even though it does not in fact characterize the way an existing thing is in the real world. Given this definition of a nonexisting property, it is impossible for existence to fail to exist. Obviously, the second part of the criterion is not met, since existence does characterize the way a great many things are in the real world, that is, existing. More crucially, however, existence cannot characterize nonexisting things, since anything which possessed existence would de facto not be a nonexisting thing. So, existence not only is not, but cannot be a nonexistent property. Therefore, existence is a property, it cannot be a nonexistent property, and so it must, to be what it is, exist. Which is to say that existence is something which exists essentially, that is, with de re absolute necessity. In which case we have an answer to the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” A few years before his death, Bede Rundle wrote a short, thought-provoking book (which we had occasion to consider in the last chapter) attempting to answer the same question, and the answer he gives (2004: 108–124) provides an almost ideal foil to the thesis of this chapter. Basically, Rundle says that it’s impossible that there could have been nothing, because to cogently assert that nothing might have existed would involve drawing upon a conception of absolute nothingness that the human mind is not capable of constructing: whenever we try to think about a complete absence of things we are always forced to reify the object of our thought as something (e.g., a darkness or a space or a field of potentiality). Therefore, it is always the case that something must exist. But, Rundle says, even if “something exists” is necessarily true under any circumstances, we should not go on to infer that it is necessarily true that any particular thing exists. It is enough to avoid absurdity by saying that something or other has to exist. I think Rundle is right to say that we cannot conceive of nothing, if “nothing” is taken in the sense of “no thing whatsoever” or “nothingness.” Things are the proper objects of thought—to think about no thing is simply not to think at

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all. (Not only, then, are we unable to conceive of nothingness existing, we are unable to conceive of nothingness not existing. “Nothingness” just does not refer to a suitable subject for the human mind.) But if it’s true, as Rundle thinks, that no thing exists necessarily, then we do not need to conceive of no thing whatsoever to conceive of a situation in which no thing exists: we can simply conceive of every thing not existing. In which case we’re still thinking about a scenario with (nonexistent) things in it, not a scenario without anything at all. So if Rundle is right, if every individual thing might not have existed, then there is nothing illogical about saying that it was possible that no thing existed. In which case Rundle’s answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (i.e., that there had to be something, but not anything in particular) isn’t right. If, on the other hand, existence is something that does necessarily exist, then even if everything else might not have existed, we have a clear object which tells us why “everything does not exist” fails to describe a possible situation.

Existence as God Parmenides was the first to capitalize on the insight that being cannot fail to be, and theologians in every era have used similar reasoning in characterizing the necessary existent as infinite. If something exists necessarily, then there can never be a time nor a place where it is true that it fails to exist, anymore than there could be a time or a place where it was true that a triangle didn’t have three sides. Recall that for meinongianism necessary truths need not be conditioned by an existential proviso. We don’t have to say that triangles, if they exist, have three sides; triangles have three sides whether they exist or not. They don’t always and everywhere exist, but they do have three sides, always and everywhere. So too, existence exists always and everywhere. It exists, by nature, eternally and ubiquitously. All of which is to say that existence is infinite. If there were some limit to being, some point at which it stopped, it would signify that beyond that point being does not exist. But it is an absurdity for existence not to exist; it is a linguistic contradiction that reveals a misunderstanding about the nature of existence. So, existence exists always and everywhere necessarily, and if time

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and space are bounded then existence exceeds those bounds. Being is infinite and transcends all restrictions. Now to perfection: imperfection is always conceived as a lack of some kind. At least one thing must be missing—one right answer on a test, the proportion of one feature on a face, one ingredient in a meal—to prevent what is good from qualifying as perfect. But something wholly infinite can’t be missing anything, there can’t be anything it doesn’t include. Nothing can be outside it, because the notion of “outside being” implies a zone where there is no being (i.e., where existence doesn’t exist), which is impossible. So existence, which necessarily exists and is infinite, is also perfect. So, there exists something which is necessary, infinite, and perfect. This is, of course, the same basic conclusion as is reached by the forms of the cosmological and ontological arguments already considered. The cosmological argument states, roughly, that things which don’t exist with absolute necessity need to be explained by something that does exist with absolute necessity. This necessarily existent being must be the cause of all other beings, and since it exists necessarily, it must be infinite and lacking nothing. The ontological argument, as we have seen, states roughly that perfection implies existence, and since what is perfect can be lacking nothing, the perfect, existing thing must be infinite. So far, then, we have a consistent and familiar theistic postulate of something that is infinite and perfect and necessarily existing. What is far less familiar or consistent across the theistic tradition is the identification of God with (a) a property and (b) existence. Yet even here there is no lack of historical precedents. The name of God recorded in the third chapter of Exodus was frequently taken by early Christian theologians as a revelation of God’s metaphysical character.1 Boethius identifies form with being, and God with pure form, making it appear that God is pure being.2 Later on Aquinas would formulate the divine nature as “subsistent being itself,” and Meister Eckhart would declare that esse est deus.3 So, characterizing God as existence itself isn’t a radically new concept.4 Characterizing God as a property is much more uncommon, although if meinongianism is right and existence is a property then by characterizing God as existence we cannot avoid concluding that God is a property. But there may be ways of understanding the term “property” that prevent this conclusion from appearing too incongruous.

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Panentheism: Everything “in” God Before getting to whether God can be a property, what implications does the notion that God is existence, and infinite, have for finite existents? For one, it seems clear that if God is infinite, then everything that exists cannot exist outside God, for the simple reason that there is no outside God. No real individual or collection can lie beyond the scope of the divine, because it can’t lie beyond the bounds of infinite existence. So, everything that exists exists in the divine existence. This doctrine, that everything else is “in” God although God is “more than” everything else is the doctrine of panentheism (“everything in God”). Of course, “in,” as a spatial metaphor, is susceptible of a wide variety of interpretations. Let’s make it more precise. If God is existence, then anything that has existence has a share in God. God has a monopoly on existence—since there is no other existence than existence—and nothing can exist unless it exists by instantiating or exemplifying or, as I would prefer to say, participating in God. As we saw in the previous chapter, if there is no existence other than God causally prior to creation, then there can be no addition to God’s existence after creation. Creatures therefore don’t add to God’s being, but share in God’s being. Now we are on much more controversial ground. Let Aquinas stand for the primary opposition to the panentheism according to which creatures exist by sharing the existence of God. True, Aquinas is willing to say that creatures are “in” God, but only as an idiom for expressing the causal dependence of creatures on God (Summa theol. 1.8.1., ad. 2). Aquinas is also willing to speak of the being of creatures (esse commune) as a participation in the being of God (Ipsum esse subsistens), but he makes it clear that by the term “participation,” in this context, he means simply “similitude,”5 and not an overlap or commonality of any kind between divine existence and the existence of creatures.6 Aquinas insists, with Aristotle, that “the first cause reigns over all things but does not intermingle with them”7 (Summa theol. 1.3.8; cf., Summa contr. gent. 1.26); consequently, God should not be identified with the existence possessed by existing creatures. Aquinas’s reasons for thinking that the existence of creatures is separate from the existence of God are various, but we’ll focus on three. First of all, as a good aristotelian, Aquinas maintains that a property has no existence or character apart from the things in which

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it inheres. If God were the existence of creatures, then he would be nothing other than the sum of creatures, with no higher quality or independence than they had. Second, if everything exists, and God is the existence of things, then everything will be God; thus, “it would be no more true to say that a stone is a being than that a stone is God”8 (Summa contr. gent. 1.26). Finally, if God is simply one ingredient which enters into the constitution of a thing, then God will be made to interact with the other ingredients. God’s existence will be molded by the different form of each thing which comes to exist, and so God will be affected, limited, and internally differentiated by everything else, an unthinkable fate for Aquinas’s immutable, impassible God. These three objections to a “shared existence” model of panentheism—to wit (a) that it would reduce God to the level of creatures, (b) that it would elevate creatures to the level of God, (c) that it would imply a passivity on the part of God—would all need to be met if panentheism were to be reconciled to classical theism. But what consistent alternative is there? Panentheism seems to stand strong on three of the divine attributes: First of all, God’s infinity. If God is truly infinite, then, as Clayton puts it, “there is no outside God” (Clayton 2000: 168). God can’t find a place beyond divinity in which to settle creatures, so the only alternative is that “God (so to speak) makes room ‘within himself ’ wherein the creature can constitute itself ” (Hill 1992: 148). These metaphors generally have to do with zones of spatial extension; why not say instead that God is infinite in degree and not in dimension? Fine, but even if we’re not dealing with extensive attributes then it still holds good that nothing is “outside” God, and that every creature’s degree of beauty, goodness, perfection, and even existence lie somewhere “along” (spatial metaphors show up when talking about degrees too) the infinite spectrum whose boundless intensity is the measure of divinity. Second, God’s identity with existence. If God is existence itself, then it seems like God is all the being there is, in which case creation doesn’t involve producing more existence, but rather God’s sharing himself with other (previously nonexistent) things in order to produce more existents. Kasper summarizes: For if God is the reality that embraces all being, it is not possible to think of his relation to the world and man as one purely of opposition; if God were simply opposed to the world, he would be limited by the world and would

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therefore be a finite being. But if God is thought of as Being in itself, then everything that exists participates in the reality of God; then God is in all things. He is therefore not simply the distant and inaccessible one who is beyond being. (trans. Matthew J. O’Connor, 1984: 149)

Third, God’s perfection. Anselm, after having gone through the ontological argument addressed God by saying, “All things exist in thee. For nothing contains thee, but thou containest all” (Proslogion 19, trans. S.N. Deane 1962: 25).9 Sokolowski (1995: 8–10) points out that if God is, as Anselm says, that than which greater cannot be conceived, then it follows that God plus the world cannot be something greater than God alone. It might be supposed, then, that since the goodness of the world is not an addition to the goodness of God—we will presume that the world has a lot of goodness in it, whatever genuine grounds for complaint—then the world’s goodness must be a sharing in God’s goodness. And if, as is traditionally held, evil is simply an absence of what should be there, then everything that is there in creatures (i.e., the goodness of creatures) exists as a share in God’s existence. So, several of the key attributes by which classical theists characterize God indicate the path toward panentheism. There is, however, a very simple strategy for sidestepping these lines of argument by appealing to apophaticism in divine attribution. That is, we can say that “existence” and “perfection” and all other associated terms either have no meaning or have wholly unintelligible meanings when applied to God. God may “exist” but divine existence is entirely unlike creaturely existence, and God may be “perfect” but that word means something completely different when we say it about God. In fact, we might just as well say that God is not perfect, or that God is beyond being, since “being” and “perfection” lose their currency outside their native province of nature. In which case there is no point discussing whether there is any overlap between the being of God and the being of creatures, or whether finite things participate in the goodness of God. Of course not, if the terms are being used wholly equivocally in the two cases. But pure apophaticism comes at a heavy cost. If our words become wholly meaningless when applied to God, or the meanings are entirely mysterious, then we have no confidence that we mean anything when we make any predication of God. Since this would destroy theological discourse as such, replacing it with an oracular mysticism, radical apophaticism is a nuclear

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option that should be used against panentheism only at the direst need. Actually, though, apophaticism misses the mark in another way; it’s one thing to warn prospective rationalists that the principles of revealed religion aren’t suitable subject matter for discursive scrutiny. In such a case, it may make sense to say that philosophy and science are unequal to the task of unpacking the content of faith. But in our case we haven’t begun with a religiously vouchsafed revelation, and then gone on to subject it to rigorous analysis. We are simply starting with the meinongian assumption that existence is a property possessed by some things and not by others. That this starting point can lead to what looks like a kind of natural theology isn’t a conclusion that can be mystically and preemptively ruled out of court. This isn’t faith seeking understanding, it’s a bottom-up approach to God that isn’t interested in being told it can’t know anything about how God “truly” is after it’s already made significant theological discoveries. So, we won’t be satisfied with simply denying attributes to God, and when we apply positive attributes we’ll continue to mean something positive by it. And when we say that God has or is an infinite attribute, whether existence or perfection, we will presume that there is no radically alternative variety of such attribute. Therefore, any participant in that attribute is derivatively sharing what God possesses first and foremost. Now to Aquinas’s objections. Does the panentheism outlined earlier collapse into pantheism? Will it lead to the blurring of the lines between creator and creature, or creature and creator? I think it surely will—unless one is a meinongian. Parmenides originally and definitively realized that if being is all you start with, then being is all you end up with. If there were different beings, they could only be different because something besides being made them different. But existence is what makes two existing things alike, they are similar in that they both are. So, what makes them different? The only other possibility is that some non-being makes them different. But if nothing is a non-being, then nothing can make any two things different. In which case no two things are different. Ergo, monism: everything is existence, one and homogenous without change or variation.10 Spinoza goes on to do with God what Parmenides did with being (which is certainly an understandable move if God is identical with existence): absorb all differences between God and creatures, and creatures themselves, into one infinite and continuous entity.

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In the twentieth century, William Carlo, a thomist with strong panentheistic leanings, tried to come up with a model wherein God could share being with creatures by somehow determining his own divine existence in certain finite ways (or modes or expressions or whatever). The image he uses is water crystallizing and forming various ice figures as it’s poured out on a cold day (Carlo 1966: 103–104). But that kind of divine activity surely isn’t creation; it’s self-expression or self-determination or self-development. As we saw when discussing the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, if God is the only thing at the outset, then there’s no way to derive other things. By the same token if God simply structures himself in different ways, there’s no ultimate basis for creaturely distinction. In which case Aquinas’s concern that on panentheism “there will be no more reason to say truly that a stone is a being than to say that a stone is God” will be validated. If on the other hand, we maintain the meinongian position, whereby things are what they are even before they come to exist, then God’s bestowal of existence, of himself in fact, does not turn creatures into God for the simple reason that creatures have other features besides existence that can distinguish them from God. A real dog may have existence from God, but its canine features it has just because it’s a dog. And those canine features make the dog not God. In which case Parmenides was wrong when he thought that nonbeing couldn’t distinguish things from each other: different nonexistents carry their differences into their new status as real creatures. All of which means that things aren’t absorbed by God when they come to participate, in ways proportionate to their natures, in the existence that belongs essentially only to (or better, consists in) the divine nature. What about Aquinas’s concern that a “commingling” of the being of God and creatures would imply some passivity within the deity? Would God have to take on the forms of things he fills with his existence? Properties might reasonably be presented as taking on the contours of what instantiates them— blue has a different shape when instantiated in a cube than in a sphere. Would God be determined or concretized by things exemplifying existence? Is the creator affected by what he creates? Certainly the term “panentheism” has acquired strong associations with the idea of God having some responsive or passive attitude toward the natural world, and toward the free choices of created persons.11 Philip Clayton,

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perhaps the most enthusiastic proponent of panentheism, suggests the analogy (which he calls the “panentheistic analogy”) of soul and body to illuminate the relationship between God and the world, in order to express that “the nature of God’s actual experience depends on interactions with finite creatures like ourselves” (cf., Clayton 2000b: 702, 2004: 83; Ward 2004). If creatures are “in” God, as the rationale goes, surely they must make a difference to God. We have said repeatedly now that any metaphysically robust version of meinongianism must insist that nonexistents cannot have a causal effect on existing things. If that is so, and if creatures are nonexistents prior to creation, having no reality until God bestows being upon them, then they cannot have a causal impact on God; all their potential to make a difference to anything real comes from God in the first place. They receive from God a finite share in existence, and as such the real relation is, as Aquinas says, all unidirectional. Creatures depend on God, God does not depend on them.12 Changes occur in creatures, while God remains unaffected. Creatures receive being from God, and God receives nothing from them. So, if creatures exist within the divine existence, it is not as constitutive or integral parts whose character to some extent determines the character of the divine whole. Creatures live off the divine host without adding to, subtracting from, or altering it in any way. Since I reject Clayton’s “panentheistic analogy,” I should perhaps provide one of my own. So, suppose a professor gives a historical lecture in which all the facts were previously unknown to the silent but rapt audience; we may say that the relation between the professor’s knowledge and the students’ knowledge parallels the relation between God’s existence and that of creatures. We would say that the professor has shared her knowledge with the students, and now they know some of what she knows. Obviously, the professor still has historical knowledge that the students lack, so even though they share her knowledge to a degree, her knowledge of the relevant historical data transcends theirs. The students’ knowledge of these historical facts is dependent on the professor’s knowledge, but not vice versa. The same lecture may result in different students having differing degrees of mastery of the subject matter, but in no case does a given student’s greater or lesser grasp of the lecture material add to, subtract from, or alter the professor’s understanding of her field in any way. Critics will be inclined to disallow the analogy on at least two points: first, in the classroom scenario the teacher isn’t alone, there are other persons present

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with whom she can share what she has. Whereas in the panentheistic model I’ve sketched out, God starts out completely by himself, and then shares his existence though nothing and nobody is there to share it with. Second, in the case of the historical lecture the students are all outside the professor, but the whole point of the “en” syllable in panentheism is to underscore that nothing can be outside of God. Well, it’s only an analogy, and if it isn’t helpful best just to let it go. Still and all I think these complaints miss the point. First, the whole thrust of meinongian theism is that God isn’t the only thing prior to creation, and in that sense he’s not alone. There’s nothing else there, but other things are things that are available candidates for creation. Second, the goal of the analogy was to illustrate the way one thing can share in another contingently, imperfectly, and without addition, subtraction, or alteration of the source. If such an arrangement is logically unproblematic in the case of knowledge, why should it cause difficulties with existence? But what does it mean in practice for God to share his existence with nonexisting things? How does God target something that isn’t there? Of course we might try to extrapolate from our own experience of creation: when we make or invent something, we might put our action into a meinongian paradigm and describe it as giving existence to something that previously lacked existence. Granted, we have other materials to work with: if we want to create a new machine, say, we can do it by restructuring combinations of existing glass and metal and plastic. Which is to say we can directly target what does exist to give existence to what doesn’t. It seems as though this option is not available to God, since the only thing that exists prior to creation is God himself, and we have already said several times that for God to act directly on himself is not so much a case of creation as of self-development. So, how does God bring a nonexistent into being without the instrumentality of other existing things? Here, as in the Chapter 6, I can only once again plead ignorance on the logistical details of divine experience and operation. There are many things God can do and we cannot, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to do them. But my inability to imagine or describe the way God does things with any precision doesn’t prove God’s distinctive abilities spurious, anymore than my inability to imagine or describe how a dog can find its way home across hundreds of miles

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of unfamiliar territory counts against the fact that some dogs do precisely that. I can, in a single mental act, direct my mind to Pegasus without thinking about something else. By the same token, there is no absurdity in supposing that God can, in a single volitional act, direct his creative activity toward Pegasus without acting on anything else. If it is a divine prerogative to create ex nihilo, if only existence itself can directly admit nonexistents into reality without the intermediacy of previously existing working materials, this will hardly come as a surprise to traditional theists. And if there is no absurdity in making nonexistents the direct targets of human thoughts, there should be none in making nonexistents the direct targets of divine activity.

Is God a property? Does it make sense to call God a property? Of course that depends on what is meant by “property.” It’s probably prudent here to refrain from devoting enormous space to the development and defense of a comprehensive semantics and ontology of properties—instead we can simply sketch in rough generality some philosophical descriptions of properties that can be sensibly applied to God given the conclusions already reached, and some that can’t. First positively, we said initially that existence is a property because some things have it and other things don’t, and the ones that have it exist and the ones that don’t have it don’t exist. We then went on to say that creatures exist because they have a share in divine existence. Suppose we single out this connotation of “property,” namely, what is participated in by many things (in ways proportionate to the nature of the particular participants), such that the participation in question determines the character of the participant in some way. We might say that blue pigment is a property in this sense, since it shares its blueness with all blue things: things manifest different intensities of blue depending on the concentration of the pigment and different amounts of blue depending on the breadth of the surface area so colored. If “God/existence is a property” is said in this sense, such that different things share in it to different degrees or extents in order to exist, then I think it is said truly. If, on the other hand, “property” is meant to denote a species of abstract object, something inhabiting a kind of platonic realm where nothing can cause

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or be caused by anything else, then obviously God could not be conceived of as a property in that sense. If God is anything then he is the universal cause, and so construing him as a causally effete entity would be to use the term “God” in a manner incompatible with its standard signification. God also cannot be a property if a property is taken to be something with no character of its own, but rather a mere modification or determination of something else—something along the lines of an aristotelian accident. We have seen that existence itself has greater self-sufficiency, since its own existence is intrinsically necessary, than any of the things which rely on it. Which means even if nothing else existed, existence would exist—consequently, it can’t be incapable of independent existence and so must have its own proper nature. Finally, a nominalist description of properties would obviously not correspond to the meinongian’s understand of existence or the theist’s understanding of God. Existence, for the meinongian, cannot be a convenient and conventional category, useful for arranging one’s own ideas but not reflective of things as they are outside the mind. Nor would any theist be content to have God described as a figure of speech that functions to artificially group certain items together. God and existence are used to describe the way things really are, and explain why they are that way; calling God a “property” in this context should therefore evoke no nominalist connotations. Does it make sense to say that God is his own property? Can we cogently claim that God possesses existence after we have concluded that God is existence? Aquinas was content to say that God was the things he possessed: God is his goodness and his existence and his knowledge. Plantinga (1980) wants to say that God has properties, not that he is them.13 It seems at least with existence that we should side with Aquinas on this issue: we began the chapter by showing that existence can be argued to be the infinite, perfect, necessarily existing being—and since existence is God then God must be existence. And it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to say that if someone is something, that someone also has that something—in other words, things possess themselves. Perhaps though we can give a sympathetic reading to those branches of mystical theology that present God as the “being beyond being,” or as the “one who neither exists nor does not exist.” If to exist is to have existence as something different than oneself, and if to not exist means not to have existence at all, then surely God will fall outside this alternative. He will be beyond being

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and non-being. If, on the other hand, to exist means to have or to be existence, then God will, on any theistic reading, most certainly exist.

God and nonexistents We are now situated to make some interesting contrasts and comparisons between the opposite ontological poles of God, who is pure existence, and the fictional objects that lack existence altogether. To begin with, it is natural to think that the infinity of God is matched by the infinity of nonexistents, although he is an infinite individual and they comprise an infinite aggregate. Things that don’t exist can certainly be enumerated ad infinitum in principle, so should we say that an infinite quantity of things doesn’t exist? Those philosophers who insist in other contexts that an infinite quantity of things doesn’t exist would likely renew their concerns about the paradoxes of infinite cardinality if a meinongian were to say that an infinite number of things are things—even if those things don’t exist (Is the infinite quantity of nonexisting fat men less than the sum of all the nonexisting fat men plus all the nonexisting thin men?). Prescinding from the cogency of infinite sets, let us hedge our bets and say that if such sets are coherent then nonexisting things constitute such a set, and if not then only an indefinite number of things fail to exist. Since at any rate there does not seem to be an apparent limit to the horde of nonexistents, where do these individuals lie? If God is infinite, and they are innumerable, it might seem we cannot keep the two parties separate. It’s been argued in this chapter that creatures exist in God insofar as they share in his being—by the same token we might say then that nonexistents are not in God insofar as they do not share in his being. But we shouldn’t hastily conclude that nonexistents are outside God; “in” and “out” are contraries, not contradictories, so we are under no logical obligation to regard “inside God” or “outside God” as exhaustive alternatives. And, in fact, there is no outside the infinite God, so nonexisting things can’t reside there—it makes no sense to conceive of a point at which God stops and nonexistents begin. We don’t have to identify a metaphysical zone where the nonexistents are; they aren’t anywhere. Nonexistent parts may inhabit larger nonexistent wholes—Captain Hook’s fictional hook is connected to his arm, and Captain Hook himself

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resides on his boat that resides in Neverland, which resides in the scenario first described by Barrie—but the multiverse comprising all fictional objects resides neither within nor beyond God. God, by contrast, as the one necessary entity, does exist in fictional scenarios, at least on any view like mine where contradictions are no more tolerated in unreality than in reality. Triangles have to have three sides in any accurate depiction of a nonexisting scenario, because if they didn’t that scenario wouldn’t be coherent. So too, if the denial of God’s existence is really tantamount to a contradiction, then no scenario could be coherent if it excluded God’s existence. God’s existence is therefore so pervasive that he has to exist even within what doesn’t. We have emphasized that nonexisting things cannot make a difference to the way real things are in the real world. However, we should mention here that real things can make a difference to the way nonexisting things are in nonexisting scenarios. For instance, in a fictional scenario the sun, which is a real thing, might make a fictional character who is not a real thing blink repeatedly. The earth, which is a real thing, will exert a gravitational pull that inhibits the flight of Lois Lane but not of Superman. So too, in any genuine fictional scenario, God will remain the universal cause and so will exercise universal influence on all the fictional objects of the scenario in question. Such influence will not, of course, affect God’s character in reality. A final interesting correspondence: fictional objects—things that never have existed and never will—enjoy a strange kind of parallel to God, even as individuals. Just as God exists always and everywhere, Pegasus (assuming God never creates him) fails to exist always and everywhere. There is no place or time when Pegasus isn’t characterized by nonexistence. Of course God’s ubiquity and eternity of existence belong to him by nature, whereas Pegasus’s temporally and spatially limitless nonexistence constitutes a non-necessary fact. He could have existed, he just happens not to, for all time and in every place.

Part Four

Providence and Freedom

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Nonexistents and Middle Knowledge

The role meinongian nonexistents might play in conceiving a model of creation should be completed by describing how God’s knowledge of nonexistents informs God’s actual creative choices. Does God survey a boundless landscape of fictional objects, all of them susceptible to reality, and simply select among them? Can God make any nonexistent object or event or universe real? I have already made it clear that I do not count contradictory objects as genuine nonexistents—Is the implication then that every (genuine) thing or scenario is an equally viable candidate for creation? There are good reasons to think not, reasons that for the most part center on the nature of free will. Many philosophers, many Christians, many people in general don’t think a decision can be free if it’s pre-determined by something else. Most people wouldn’t naturally consider themselves to be free if they were “made” to do something, whether they were made to behave a certain way by external force, methods of torture, genetic programming, or uncontrollable psychological impulses. It follows that we wouldn’t consider ourselves to be free if we were made to do something by God. But if God can simply create us as choosing whatever he likes, then God is, quite literally, making our choices for us, so we can’t be free at all. The result of this (crudely presented) line of thinking is libertarian theism: the doctrine that created free choices are not causally determined by God nor by anything else.1 To put it in meinongian terms, once Adam is real, it is Adam who decides which version of himself will be fully realized: the apple-eating Adam or the apple-refusing Adam. Both versions start out as legitimate nonexistents, but God’s creative activity plus Adam’s free choice will make one completely real.

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Plainly, libertarian theism has enormous repercussions for the intellectual problem of dealing with evil. If God can’t make us freely choose the good, then the fact of evil—or at least, the fact of moral evil—becomes easier to reconcile with the existence of an all-good Creator. By contrast, forms of Christian compatibilism (e.g., calvinism, bañezian thomism), which claim that God’s eternal decree determines exactly which free choices I will make and which I will fail to make, have less appeal to contemporary theists since they seem to suggest that God from all eternity prefers that some creatures sin and are perhaps even damned. One of the crucial questions that arises for Christian libertarians is this: given that God doesn’t determine our free choices, how does the divine intellect know what our free choices are? Is God’s knowledge of human free choices dependent on the existence of those choices? If so, then in planning the providential scheme, God must react to free choices in arranging the events subsequent to them. This places God in an attitude of passivity toward our free decisions, and furthermore means that the way the elementary conditions of the universe are set, along with the initial cast of created persons introduced in the world—all these divine decisions—are uninfluenced by God’s knowledge regarding how the story of the universe will ultimately play out.2 This not only diminishes the traditional divine attribute of pure, perfect actuality, but also leads to concerns about the trustworthiness of divine providence. It becomes more difficult to abandon oneself to divine providence, to tell oneself that God’s in control, when God, like us, is just waiting to see what happens before trying to get a handle on things like sin and suffering after the fact. Also, how is it that God can so confidently prophesize what someone’s free choices will be (as in the case of Peter’s denial3), when the prophecy is made at a time causally prior to the free choice, while the knowledge of the free choice—which is needed to make the prophecy with confidence in the first place—is causally dependent on the free choice itself? Open theism, the position that God doesn’t know “in advance” what creaturely free choices will be, has proposed solutions to all these problems (e.g., God’s prophecies are always provisional; the trustworthiness of the divine plan isn’t based on foreknowledge, but on God’s ability to spontaneously orchestrate all the variables of free choice; some passivity in God shouldn’t count as an imperfection), but for most believers, as for much of Scripture and virtually all of the Christian tradition, it is a

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given that God knows—and has always known—everything that has taken place or will take place, including the free choices of creatures (cf., Flint 1998: 11–22). The fusion of libertarian theism with the effort to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty and foreknowledge is called molinism, after its founder Luis de Molina. The key feature of molinism is that it ascribes to God a “middle knowledge” of “futurabilia.” The latter term denotes the free, causally undetermined choices that free creatures would have made if those creatures had existed and if various other conditions had existed (obtained). The knowledge whereby God knows what those free choices would have been is, on the molinist view, divine middle knowledge. Take as a typical example Jesus’s words in the Gospel of Matthew: “Woe to you, Corozain! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, they would have repented long ago with sackcloth and ashes” (Luke 10:13). Suppose that Jesus (and, by implication, God) knows with absolute certainty that, under the conditions specified, Tyre and Sidon would have freely repented. Of course, such miracles were not wrought, and such repentance did not occur. It certainly seems possible that such repentance might have occurred, but the claim goes so far as to assert that it would have occurred. We are dealing then with a counterfactual claim regarding creaturely freedom—so how does God know that this claim is true? For a traditional Christian compatibilist, God knows what would have been freely chosen in alternate scenarios because God knows what divine decree would have been issued in governing those alternate scenarios, and since that decree would have determined what was freely chosen, God knows what those free choices would have been. The way creatures would have chosen in alternate scenarios, like the way they actually choose in the real world, is determined by God. For a molinist, however, the truth-values of the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are not up to God. God is not in control of possibilities (contra universal possibilism), nor is God in control of futurabilia—therefore, divine knowledge of both is classed as prevolitional. God does not decide what could have been the case, nor what would have been the case. But God does decide what is or will be the case, and is guided by the divine knowledge of

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both possibilities and futurables in so deciding. By looking at possibilities God sees (obviously enough) what is possible, and by looking at what free persons would do if they existed in certain circumstances God sees what is feasible.4 It is possible that Gertrude freely chooses x in circumstances y, but it is not feasible for God to create a world where Gertrude freely chooses x in circumstances y, because God knows that if Gertrude were to be created and put in circumstances y, she would not in fact freely choose x. God therefore, drawing upon natural knowledge of possibilities and middle knowledge of the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, chooses which feasible scenario to initiate and sustain,5 and the real world unfolds, along with our undetermined free choices, exactly as God knew it would. The benefits of molinism are therefore twofold: first, it leaves God in absolute control of creation’s history. God knows, down to the minutest detail, what scenarios are feasible candidates for creation, selects one, and launches the creaturely program knowing full well what the final outcome will be. Second, because God knows what our free decisions would have been in any scenario, God knows what our free decisions will be in the scenario that is actually realized. But just as God did not causally determine what our free decisions would have been in any other scenario, so God does not causally determine what our free decisions are in the scenario that is actually realized. Therefore we, and not God, are ultimately responsible for how our free decision-making history plays out. As Flint summarizes molinism: God has both complete foreknowledge concerning how those creatures will act and great control over their actions, in the sense that any act they perform is either intended or permitted by him. Yet because the knowledge which generates this foresight and sovereignty is not itself a product of free divine activity, our actions remain genuinely free, not the robotic effects of divine causal determination. (Flint 1998: 44)

Objections to molinism The objections to molinism are manifold as well, and certainly too many to engage in all their variety here. But I think two of the central objections are particularly interesting from the perspective of meinongianism, and

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illustrate how taking nonexistents seriously can alleviate some of the cardinal inadequacies with which molinism is usually charged. The first of these objections is, quite simply, that middle knowledge is knowledge without an object. Knowledge of possibilities is one thing, and as we saw in Part One is often considered reducible to existing things (e.g., abstract objects, ideas, capabilities). Knowledge of straightforward reality is the paradigmatic case of knowledge—what we know is plainly there to be known. But what does it mean to know something that doesn’t exist, and yet is something other than possibility? Put the objection differently: certain things are possible because they can be brought about by existing causal capabilities. Possibilities thus—so it is said—exist in their (existing) potential causes. Other things are real because they actually exist, here and now. But nonexistent free choices aren’t determinable by existing causal structures, so they don’t exist determinately in existing causal capabilities. They also don’t exist determinately here and now. So they don’t exist determinately at all. Therefore, the reasoning goes, we can’t know nonexisting libertarian choices because there’s nothing there to know. The second objection argues that there’s an incoherence involved in positing both real free choices and a class of furturabilia that causally precede them. After all, if there’s a set of eternal truths about what someone would do in certain circumstances, and if it’s impossible that the person in question should deviate from those truths, then the person is not free to refrain from freely choosing as those truths dictate (cf., Hasker 1989: 19–52, 186–206; van Inwagen 2008: 217–220). The issue is sometimes framed in terms of circularity: supposing molinism to be true, it seems that my free decisions depend on God’s creative decisions, God’s creative decisions depend on his middle knowledge, middle knowledge depends on the truths of futurabilia (counterfactuals of creaturely freedom), and futurabilia depend on my free decisions (cf., Kenny 1979: 171; Adams 1991: 343–353; Hasker 2011: 29–35). None of these items in the molinist framework can be what it is without the other items being what they are: if God made different creative decisions, I couldn’t make the free decisions I make, and if I make different free decisions than the ones I make, then the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom wouldn’t, in fact, be true. This seems an exemplary case of epistemological and ontological bootstrappulling, and would, as such, be a fairly lethal blow to molinism.

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The nonexisting subject matter of middle knowledge Before proceeding to a meinongian response to anti-molinism, it probably makes sense to recast molinism along broadly meinongian lines. Supposing both meinongianism and molinism are true, we should say that God knows eternally and in every detail countless nonexistent scenarios. All these scenarios are alike in that they might be real; hence, they are all possible. The scenarios differ from one another, however, in whether or not they would be real if God were to creatively initiate them. Some scenarios are such that even if God were to creatively initiate them, they would not become real because the persons inhabiting them would, once created, choose in such a way as to realize alternative scenarios. These scenarios are therefore “infeasible,” although possible (they are therefore not necessarily infeasible; they simply happen to be infeasible). All other scenarios are both possible and feasible: if God were to creatively initiate them, they would be fully realized. It should be evident that corresponding to every infeasible possible scenario is a feasible possible scenario, that is, a scenario with the same initial conditions but wherein the free person chooses what she would choose if she and the particular conditions of her situation actually existed.6 All nonexistent scenarios are inherently possible, that is, there is nothing intrinsic to them which prevents them from becoming real. Some nonexistent scenarios, however, are non-essentially infeasible, which is to say that it is a non-necessary fact that the free persons within those scenarios would, if created, prevent them from becoming fully real. Thus, we may say that nonexistent scenarios, like nonexistent things and non-divine things generally, have essential and non-essential features. They are all essentially possible, while some are non-essentially feasible and others are non-essentially infeasible. And God, in knowing all possibilities, also knows which possibilities are feasible and which aren’t. And all these possibilities and all these feasibilities consist of nonexistent scenarios filled with nonexisting things. Now we return to the two basic criticisms leveled against the molinist model. First, it’s said that in the supposed case of middle knowledge, there’s nothing to know. Futurabilia don’t constitute existing things, and they aren’t derivable from existing things. Therefore, there can be no object that corresponds to futurabilia, and there can be no knowledge that doesn’t correspond to an existing object.

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The key issue is the nonexistence of the free choices at the time (or explanatory moment) when those choices are supposedly known: Statements about factual occurrences are true in virtue of the actual events they report. Ordinary causal conditionals are true in virtue of the laws of nature linking their antecedents with their consequents. When a person makes a free choice, the outcome is not guaranteed by the laws of nature, but in that case the proposition asserting that the choice was made is true in virtue of the actual choice made by the agent. Counterfactuals of freedom, however, fall into none of these categories. Their truth is not guaranteed by laws of nature, and in most cases the choices are never actually made— indeed, innumerable such counterfactuals concern possible agents who never exist at all. So what, if anything, makes these counterfactuals true? (Hasker 2011: 26)

One molinist response to the objection that nothing makes some counterfactuals of creaturely freedom true is simple agreement. Nothing “makes” futurabilia, nor does anything make true the propositions describing them; they just are true (cf., Gaskin 1993). Or, to use Merricks’s phrasing, true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true because the agents described by them would do what the counterfactuals say they would in the particular circumstances in question (Merricks 2011: 67).7 Another response might be to claim that true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are about the world: the world is such that so-and-so, if she were real, and were placed in these circumstances, would behave thusly. But, of course, even if we allow (for the sake of argument) that the counterfactual is implicitly about the world in general, specifically it’s about so-and-so. She is the one we’re imagining, thinking of, describing when we say that she would have freely done thusly. Merricks, seemingly unconsciously, takes the nominalist stance toward fictional objects when he claims that “to know what a proposition is ‘about’ in this sense is not to know of some object or state of affairs to which that proposition is related by an aboutness relation. Rather, it is to understand or grasp that proposition” (Merricks 2007: 33). That’s badly off. Propositions aren’t about themselves, so knowing/understanding/grasping what a proposition is about isn’t to know/understand/grasp the proposition. And counterfactual thoughts and propositions have the same aboutness structure as other propositions—they’re about what certain people would do under certain circumstances.

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Merricks and molinists generally are right to deny that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom aren’t grounded in reality, and anti-molinists generally are right to observe that counterfactuals of creaturely freedom seem to be about something even though there’s nothing there for them to be about. Enter the meinongian, who complacently affirms that the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are genuinely about something, and what they are about isn’t there (i.e., doesn’t exist). But of course, the meinongian holds the same view of all propositions referencing possibilities, fictional objects, uninstantiated properties, etc. All these propositions, if true, are true because they correspond to some object, because they reference some thing and describe it accurately. In the case of free counterfactuals, if the counterfactuals are true, it’s because certain nonexisting things (or at least, things that, at the causal moment when God eternally knows them, don’t exist), are such that they would behave a certain way if they were made real.8 Another variation of the objection to molinism comes from the common association of indeterminacy and nonexistence (cf., Chapter 3). Existence is fully determinate, whereas nonexisting things are thought to be indeterminate—they have only as many features as the one imagining them cares to enumerate. Take Sherlock Holmes. Doyle might tell us (I don’t know if he does) that Sherlock Holmes has brown eyes while neglecting to tell us whether Sherlock Holmes parts his hair, and if so on which side he parts it. So, Sherlock Holmes is definite with regard to eye-color, but indefinite with regard to hair-parting. A real person, of course, is definite with regard to both. Now it may be argued that we can learn certain definite but unarticulated features about Sherlock Holmes by making inferences from the features which have been fictionally depicted (a process Sherlock Holmes would doubtless approve of). So, if Sherlock Holmes has brown eyes then we might infer that he has at least one brown-eyed parent, since two blue-eyed parents can almost never have a biological son with brown eyes. But there seems no way to infer anything from Holmes’s eye-color about the parting of his hair. His hairparting is, so the argument goes, therefore indeterminate, and so unknowable; if we wanted to know whether or how he parts his hair, we’d have to have the real hair, presumably attached to the real man, before us. The analogy with free will should be clear. If we suppose Gertrude to be a nonexistent woman, placed in nonexistent circumstances, then we can infer

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certain things about her. We can infer that she has a body and a mind, and that as a woman she has two x-chromosomes, etc. We can also elaborate her hypothetical circumstances indefinitely, and we can recognize that certain further characteristics about Gertrude can be inferred from those hypothetical circumstances. So, surely, can God. But what we can’t infer from either her circumstances or her character, according to libertarianism, is what her free choices would be. That’s not because there’s a defect in our inferential powers, but because Gertrude’s free choices are not susceptible of inference from her circumstances or her character. Therefore, God cannot infer what someone’s free choices would be, just by knowing what that person’s character would be or in what circumstances that person would be placed. What a person’s free choices would be in a nonexistent scenario is therefore indeterminate, and so unknowable. Kondoleon states: Since free will is open to opposites, what choice a certain possible free creature would make in a given set of circumstances were it to exist along with those circumstances is something intrinsically indeterminate and, therefore, unknowable. In a word, there can be no determinate truth about something indeterminate. (Kondoleon 1983: 22–23)

If there is such a thing as libertarian free will, its determination can’t be known by knowing the non-determining circumstances in which it occurs. It seems to some to follow that one would have to wait until the free choice occurred in order to know it. “Truth follows being, and the being of the free future, or even of the free conditional future, is undetermined” (GarrigouLagrange, trans. Bede Rose ([1943] 1959): 470, fn. 171). Hence, the reasoning goes, there could be no determinate truth about such matters. An easy meinongian–molinist answer to this is that God doesn’t derive knowledge about nonexistent free choices via a process of inference from the character of the agents or their surrounding circumstances. He knows the free choices in themselves. That’s what middle knowledge means. And, as we have already argued in Part One, the incompleteness of our knowledge of nonexistents—like the incompleteness of our knowledge of real things— doesn’t imply anything about the determinateness of the things in themselves. God’s knowledge, moreover, isn’t incomplete. If it’s true that real free choices are undetermined (i.e., not causally determined by something else), they may still be determinate in themselves, and God knows things as they are in themselves.

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So too, unreal free choices are not causally determined by the character of the agents or the surrounding circumstances, but they are determinate in themselves. Therefore, God knows about those choices, and knows what those choices would be if certain agents and circumstances were real. A final, and perhaps belated, point before moving on from the “there’s nothing to know” objection to molinism: what about platonism? Can’t that give us an existing object for the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom? Consider how a platonist might deal with the paradigmatic free counterfactual from Matthew: “Woe to you, Corozain! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if in Tyre and Sidon had been wrought the miracles that have been wrought in you, they would have repented long ago with sackcloth and ashes.” A platonist might say that the state of affairs Tyre and Sidon repenting exists, but doesn’t obtain. A platonist might say that the possible world in which Tyre and Sidon repent exists, but isn’t actual. A platonist might say that the properties being-the-repentant-city-of-Tyre and being-the-repentant-cityof-Sidon exist, but aren’t exemplified. So why can’t the platonist just say that Jesus’s counterfactual statements, and God’s middle knowledge generally, are about these existing abstract objects? Christian platonism has provided a steady foil throughout this book and since this is the last time it will come up thematically, let me give my general assessment of the differences between platonic theism and meinongian theism before addressing how each fares with respect to middle knowledge. In certain respects the abstract objects of platonism and the nonexistent objects of meinongianism are profoundly alike. Both are presented as being knowable, both are generally regarded as causally effete, and both are beyond the realm of sensible experience. So why prefer one over the other? The key distinction, I take it, is that platonism asserts a discontinuity of kind and a continuity of existence between abstract objects and concrete objects— concrete and abstract objects are different things, and different kinds of things, which both exist. Meinongianism, on the other hand, asserts a continuity of kind, and even a continuity of identity, but a discontinuity of existence between real and fictional objects. This difference gives meinongians a number of what I think are excellent advantages. For one thing, meinongianism can be much more elegant in terminology. Platonists, as we just saw two paragraphs ago, have to say that some things either obtain or don’t obtain, other things are either

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actual or non-actual, other things are either exemplified or unexemplified, etc. This all seems fairly tedious when one can simply consolidate by saying that some things (whether worlds, states of affairs, properties, or substances) exist while others don’t. More crucially, as we’ve seen over the course of the preceding chapters, platonists have a harder time making sense of our talk about fictional objects, of the possible nonexistence of concrete things, and of divine uniqueness as the one eternal, necessary being. For all these reasons, meinongianism seems to me to be a better fit than platonism when it comes to a philosophically rigorous theism. Which works better with molinism? Suppose we adopt a platonist stance and say that there is an essence of myself, one which, moreover, I instantiate. But I, although an instantiation of my essence, am not my essence; it is an abstract object and I am a concrete object. Likewise, there exists an essence of Curley Smith, the mayor of Boston—but this essence is uninstantiated, because there is no such person as Curley Smith, mayor of Boston.9 Thus, while Curley Smith does not exist, his uninstantiated essence does. If God knows what Curley Smith, mayor of Boston, would freely choose to do if he existed and were offered a bribe under certain circumstances, then God does not merely know something about Curley Smith’s uninstantiated essence, for the simple reason that Curley Smith’s uninstantiated essence is not Curley Smith (remember, Curley Smith, mayor of Boston, doesn’t exist, although his essence supposedly does). The platonist might try to rephrase things by saying that via middle knowledge God knows that Curley Smith’s essence, were it instantiated, would freely choose to accept (or reject) a bribe under certain conditions. But if Curley Smith’s essence were instantiated, it wouldn’t be Curley Smith’s essence— it would be Curley Smith himself, who would be, according to platonism, something individually and specifically different from his essence. Therefore, if platonism is true, knowledge of Curley Smith’s instantiated essence/Curley Smith is irreducible to knowledge of Curley Smith’s uninstantiated essence— they are two different things and two different kinds of things, and so to know one of them is different than to know the other. Even if we say that God knows Curley Smith by means of knowing Curley’s essence, we can’t dispense with Curley Smith himself as the proper subject matter of middle knowledge. So, the abstract object denoted by “Curley Smith’s uninstantiated essence” is not enough for God to know about if God has middle knowledge.

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With meinongianism, by contrast, when God knows what Curley Smith would do if he were to exist, it is the same Curley Smith who does not exist, but might exist and (if God ever creates him) will exist. So, God can know the nonexistent Curley Smith, and knows what he would do if he were real and placed in certain circumstances. Consequently, the nonexistent Curley Smith is enough for God to know about if God has middle knowledge. So, meinongianism seems to prevail over platonism in the case of middle knowledge as well.

Causal circularity? What about the second objection to middle knowledge that the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are causally prior to free choices, and that this leads to, among other things, a vicious causal circularity and the paradox of free libertarian choices that are predetermined to occur before they happen? The circle is broken when we adduce that crucial principle which had already played a significant role before, namely that there cannot be causal influence from nonexisting things to existing things. Now the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, insofar as they are truly counterfactual, describe nonexisting scenarios. Those nonexisting scenarios can’t cause anything real, and so in this case they can’t causally impact God’s knowledge. It also strikes me as clear that the actual (i.e., existing) free choices can’t be causally responsible for truthvalues of molinist counterfactuals—how could our time-bound choices be the cause of the eternal (but non-necessary) truths of the counterfactuals that God from all eternity knows? Moreover, statisticians are perpetually reminding us (pace Hume) of the difference between correspondence and causality, and it seems easy enough to apply the distinction here. The three relevant elements (a) God’s knowledge, (b) free human choices, and (c) the nonexistent scenarios described by the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom—these three all correspond without causally determining the others. We may say, moreover, that none of these need to be what they are—my choices are free, and so unnecessary, and therefore so is the counterfactual of what I would have freely done in another scenario, and therefore so is God’s knowledge of both—

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but they necessarily correspond. To offer a simplistic analogy, there are no requirements as to what formula one puts on either side of an equals sign, but it is required that those formulas correspond in value. So too, God’s knowledge of my free choices and my free choices and futurabilia could all be other than what they are—I might have chosen differently, and God’s knowledge of my free choices might have been different—but necessarily all of them correspond each to the others. Now the only thing which, on the libertarian view, makes a free choice impossible is extrinsic causal predetermination (“something else made me do it”) or intrinsic essential necessity (“I can’t help it, that’s just the way I am”). But the fact that before I existed it was true that, if I existed, I would freely choose thusly doesn’t determine me to freely choose thusly—nor does God’s knowledge of that fact determine me to freely choose thusly. Therefore, the correspondences don’t interfere with freedom. The anti-molinist replies: if my free choices necessarily correspond to God’s knowledge about exactly what I choose, and if God knows exactly what I choose before I even exist, then it is impossible that I fail to choose exactly as God knew I would, in which case my choice isn’t free. So, the necessary correspondence of God’s knowledge and my free choice, combined with the existence of God’s knowledge before my free choices, precludes the possibility of my not choosing exactly as I do. The problem with this objection is that it makes an unjustifiable extension from the necessity of correspondence to the necessity of one of the terms. It is true that futurabilia, God’s knowledge, and actual free choices all necessarily correspond. It is also, consequently, true that if one were to know any one of these items, one would be able to infer the others, but that is a logical/epistemological point, not a modal feature of any of the items. If God knows that I will do thusly, the clear implication is that I will do thusly; but we cannot legitimately go on to claim that I must do thusly. I might do otherwise, and if I had done otherwise God would have always known that I would do otherwise. All of the terms might have been different, which means, simply, that none of the terms is necessary, even if all necessarily correspond. And, as we’ve already established, this necessary correspondence isn’t equivalent to causation, so it can’t entail causal determination. So, there doesn’t seem to be any incompatibility between real, libertarian free choices and corresponding truths about counterfactuals of creaturely freedom known by God.

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Does the idea of middle knowledge imply a vicious causal circle? Not if there isn’t causal determination between the three relevant items of futurabilia, God’s knowledge, and real free choices. It’s true that if God’s knowledge had been different, our free choices would have been different, and if futurabilia had been different, God’s knowledge would have been different, and if our free choices would have been different, futurabilia would have been different—in other words, if any of the three items would have been different than they are, as they could have been, the other items would have been different as well. But because correspondence doesn’t equal causality, we need have no vicious causal circle. More than that, because there cannot be causal relations between existing things and nonexisting things, two links in the purportedly circular causal chain are broken, namely the link between real free choices and futurabilia, and between futurabilia and God’s knowledge of the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. So, a causal circle cannot obtain. Anti-molinists will insist that (supposing I freely choose x) if I were not to freely choose x, then it would not have been true before I existed that were I to exist I would freely choose x, in which case divine knowledge before creation would have been different than it actually was. In other words, I now control, through my free choices, the content of God’s knowledge before I even exist— and if this is not paradoxical, then nothing is. The only molinist response, I think, is to stubbornly return to the distinction between correspondence and causality, and to indicate that the counterfactuality (e.g., if I hadn’t done this, God’s knowledge would have been different) in this case expresses correspondence but simply isn’t enough for causation.10 One final point on meinongian molinism: the causal impasse between real things and unreal things—particularly with respect to knowledge—defuses one of the major historical objections to molinism, namely, that molinism requires God to be causally passive to the prior reality of futurabilia. GarrigouLagrange represents the objection as follows: God’s knowledge cannot be determined by anything which is extrinsic to Him, and which would not be caused by Him. But such is the scientia media, which depends on the determination of the free conditioned future; for this determination does not come from God but from the human liberty, granted that it is placed in such particular circumstances; so that “it was not in God’s power to know any other thing … , but if the created free will were

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to do the opposite, He would have known this other thing,” as Molina says in the passage just quoted. Thus God would be dependent on another, would be passive in His knowledge, and would be no longer pure Act. The dilemma is unresolvable: Either God is the first determining Being, or else He is determined by another; there is no other alternative. (Garrigou-Lagrange, trans. Bede Rose ([1943] 1959): 465–466)

Once we grant that nonexistents, while they constitute genuine objects for knowledge, cannot cause that knowledge, there’s no longer any reason to complain that nonexistents cause God’s knowledge. We don’t know unicorns or Curley Smith or a yankee in King Arthur’s court the way we know real things, by allowing them to causally impact our powers of perception or apprehension. Nor does God’s knowledge involve adopting a position of causal passivity. Like us, God knows nonexistents thanks to the resources of his own intellect. Granted, God knows more about nonexistents both quantitatively (presumably God knows all nonexistents) and qualitatively (God knows what free nonexistents would do if they were real), but this more complete knowledge needn’t imply any more passivity in God’s knowledge than in ours. But don’t these nonexistents limit God? Don’t they have the effect of reducing the divine creative options? It’s one thing to say that God can only do what’s possible, or conversely that God can’t go against necessity. But what someone would freely do, if they existed, isn’t (on the libertarian view) a matter of necessity. It’s simply a contingent fact about what doesn’t exist. So, “how could there be a logically contingent state of affairs, prior to the creation and existence of any created beings with free will, which an omnipotent god would have to accept and put up with?” (Mackie 1982: 174). A meinongiain view of creation portrays God as presented with an incalculable landscape of uncreated things, all of which have their own character. Aspects of that character may be essential, in which case we say that the thing in question has that feature necessarily, while other aspects of a nonexistent thing’s character may be non-essential (such as feasibility), in which case we say that the thing in question has that feature non-necessarily. It would be misleading to speak of God as constricted by these things and their characters, or as being forced to “put up with” them. Better to say that before God makes something, God knows what that thing is like, which isn’t a

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limitation but a creative resource. The freedom to innovate and invent, on the meinongian view, is tied to the expansiveness and profundity of one’s ability to know nonexistents. God, in knowing all nonexistents and everything about their character, is therefore supremely free to innovate and invent according to his good pleasure.

9

Evil as Nonexistence

Is God the cause of evil? Virtually, no one in the orthodox tradition would answer this question affirmatively. Well then, is evil a basic, ultimate energy coexisting alongside God, a kind of bad force that challenges God’s good force? This kind of good–evil dualism has surfaced repeatedly and has always been rejected by orthodoxy as an affront to God’s absolute dominion. There is no real competitor to God. The result is that with occasional and minor exceptions, orthodox monotheism has consistently upheld the doctrine that all evil is a privation, a lack, an absence of being of some kind. This makes evil quite relevant to our theme, since we might reasonably suppose meinongian theism to have a distinctive approach to the problem of things that should exist but don’t. Since no one cares (or should care) much about fictional evils, whether natural evils like the sinking of Atlantis or moral evils like Iago’s vicious scheming, let me acknowledge them and then move on. A privation theory of evil can apply perfectly well to nonexistents, just as the notion of causality can. A fictional object is evil or bad in a particular scenario if it is lacking features in that scenario which it should have based on the kind of thing it is. A sunken city is a bad city because it lacks the features any human habitation should have, like available, breathable air, while Iago is evil because he lacks many of the crucial qualities a human being should have, like honesty and goodwill. So much for fictional evil. In what follows, when speaking about evil or privation I will intend only the absences of due goods in the real world. And if real evil involves something not existing, not being there in the real world (even though it should be), then at least at first glance it looks very much like we’re on meinongian ground. At bare minimum, evil as privation is a notion which an analysis of theology and nonexistence should include.

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Knowing what should be there The meinongian who accepts a privation theory of evil as well as a molinist account of free will can categorize nonexistent properties according to three different dispositions toward real things. There is the modal disposition, which consists in the nonexistent properties a real thing could have. There is a feasible disposition, namely, the nonexistent properties a real thing would have (this disposition is analogous to suarezian properties). Finally, there is a normative disposition consisting in the nonexistent properties a real thing should have. That nonexisting properties with normative dispositions are the subjects of our speech and thought about evil can be argued very easily. Let us state clearly that in the privation theory “evil” denotes a scenario in which something that should be present is missing. Badness “consists of what is not there in something that is there” (Davies 2006: 179). Suppose we agree that it is an evil, in the sense of a serious misfortune, for a person to lose her sight. This is based on the conviction that a person should have sight, and that someone who has lost her sight doesn’t have what she should have. Grammatically, of course, “She doesn’t have sight, though she should” is equivalent to “Sight is not had by her, though it should be.” If someone were to ask, “Where is the sight that the blind person should have but doesn’t?” it would be natural to respond, “It doesn’t exist.” On a simple meinongian reading, then, sight which doesn’t exist though it should is referentially involved in such simple statements as “It’s too bad she lost her sight.” The argument may be easy, but the resulting claim might seem counterintuitive. Surely, when we lament a privation we are talking and thinking about the one who suffers the privation, and not the things the sufferer is missing? If we know what the existing thing is, and what the existing thing should be, we can know whether the thing in question suffers from a privation. In other words, we can know privation by looking at existence—there’s no need to invoke nonexistence as the object of our thought. As Aquinas says when describing God’s knowledge of evil: “if something is known, then from this its privation and its contrary are known … hence, since evil is the privation of good, it follows that just as he [God] knows all good and the measure of everything whatsoever, he knows every evil thing” (de Ver. 2.15; cf., de Ver. 3.4, ad. 6 and 7).1

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Aquinas’s statement seems to me unproblematic, as long as the distinction is carefully maintained between what is known and how it is known. When a real thing is known it’s known through itself. When a nonexistent object is known by a real intellect it’s known through something real. So, there is no trouble saying that privations are known by means of knowing real things: I know which correct answers are missing on a student’s test by looking at the real test in front of me. But only if I know which right answers are missing can I fairly appraise the student’s performance. If I look at what exists, I see a thing, and its nature, and I can say what that thing should be. I also see what properties it does have, and I can therefore see to what extent it fulfills its nature. But if I want to know to what extent it does not fulfill its nature, I have to know what properties the thing doesn’t have—and knowing what properties the thing doesn’t have presumes knowing the nature of the properties that don’t exist, which is simply another form of meinongian knowledge.

Freely chosen nonexistence Evil as such is a staggeringly large subject, and for the rest of this chapter I only want to discuss one or two points of metaphysical consistency. I certainly do not wish to present a general theodicy. There will be no arguments attempting to make it credible that God would allow so much evil to infect the universe in light of greater goods that can be more or less apprehended and characterized. Like most believers, I think ideas about heaven, uncompelled and sacrificial love, heroism, soul-building, etc. all factor in when tackling this ultimate existential problem, but since I’m not going to tackle the problem as a whole I won’t appeal (at least not much) to any of the key elements of a solution. I’ll also avoid any issues connected to suffering, and that for two reasons: I don’t think suffering is a form of nonexistence, and I don’t think suffering is a form of evil. These are both traditional convictions, but today while the first would probably not be too controversial the second sounds implausible to the point of paradox. Beginning with the first, then: suffering seems a very real, very positive, very concretely existing phenomenon. Suffering is an experience, an acute one, and not just the absence of experience. Nothing about it, as far as I can tell, would make it the particular study of the meinongian.

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Second, suffering isn’t evil—quite the contrary, it’s the appropriate experiential response to evil. Supposing evil to have occurred, we should feel badly about it. This is most easily seen with sensory suffering, or pain. Pain involves a recognition that something is wrong (say, when a child touches a candle flame) and prompts us to do something about it (withdraw the finger). It informs and impels, identifying evil and urging us away from it. Congenital analgesia, a condition in which a person cannot feel pain, isn’t an improvement on the normal human situation; it’s a handicap that seriously threatens normal functioning and even survival. Broader kinds of suffering also indicate proper human responsivity. Being moved by genuine tragedy indicates a fuller personal maturity, and sympathizing with the needs of the distressed motivates social reform. Admittedly, if there were no evil, there would be no suffering, but since evil is a fact of life it should be the case that suffering exists, in which case suffering can’t be aptly characterized as something that shouldn’t be there. We might say suffering shouldn’t be there in various counterfactual circumstances, but I’m only interested in evil as what ought not to occur in any circumstances. In other words, I’m only going to focus on evil in the strict sense. Finally, I don’t want to deal any further with what has sometimes been called “natural evil” or “nonmoral evil”—sickness, death, the absence of sight, the disharmony between humans and their environment (as evidenced by the human cost of earthquakes, for example), etc. Traditional theism maintains that all these evils are ultimately traceable to the evil decisions of finite subjects (and not, incidentally, human subjects). The idea is, roughly, that God set up a world of mutual interdependence, and moral privations introduced at one end of the causal chain will lead to nonmoral privations later on down the chain. Imagine you and I are doing a trust exercise, where one participant falls backward, relying on the other participant to catch her before she hits the ground. Suppose you have every reason to trust me, and so you fall backward toward me. Suppose further that I perversely and freely fail to catch you, so that you fall on the floor and fracture your wrist. Now we may say that the absence of bone integrity in your wrist is due to the absence of my arms reaching out, which is in turn due to the absence of my decision to catch you. Thus, there is a chain of privations (where certain things aren’t present but should be), but the first privation is my not making the right decision. That first privation, on

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the traditional view, is the heart and start of evil, and that’s what I want to talk about from a meinongian perspective. The subject for the rest of the chapter, in other words, is sin, and not simply sins of omission. Even in the case of sins of commission (e.g., sins of violence or deceit or theft, etc.), the distinguishing feature of the act is something missing which should be there (respect for truth or personal dignity or private property, etc.). So whence this absence of respect for what matters, which infects behaviors and makes them morally deficient? If the reason anything exists at all is because God causes it, then it seems initially consistent to say that the reason anything at all does not exist is because God didn’t cause it. If then, moral evil involves certain things not existing (the rectitude of my behavior, or the attendance on my part to what is morally relevant when making decisions), does it follow that the reason these things don’t exist is simply because God hasn’t caused them to exist? Many theological schools have thought so. We will call their position the Divine Withholding Account (DWA) of sin. The DWA fits neatly with the broader category of Christian determinism or Christian compatibilism, since it maintains that the divine determination of every aspect of our destiny in no way interferes with human freedom or responsibility. And initially, DWA is difficult to refute, once it’s agreed that God is the universal cause. Why don’t unicorns exist? Because God hasn’t made any. Why don’t thieves possess a governing respect for the legitimate property of others? It seems an easy inference to say that it’s because God hasn’t causally provided them (either directly or through secondary causes) with that governing respect. Of course, it would be a misrepresentation to suggest that Christian compatibilists make God the cause of evil: since evil consists in something not existing, it can’t properly speaking have a real cause—it doesn’t require a source of existence.2 But the ultimate answer to the question Why does evil occur in the world? is, on the Christian compatibilist model, because God has chosen not to give existence to certain things with the result that creatures are involved in a network of related defects, beginning with the moral defect in free creaturely agency called sin. So DWA, like Christian compatibilism generally, is a hard sell for the same two reasons we discussed in the last chapter: (a) it undermines our confidence in

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human freedom and responsibility, (b) it undermines our confidence in God’s goodness. I don’t have anything new to say against Christian compatibilism here, but I want to try and see whether meinongianism can help strengthen an alternative account as to where evil comes from. What alternative account is there? The goal is this: we want to be able to give an ultimate answer to all Why does that exist? questions by referencing God, and we want to be able to give an ultimate answer to at least some Why doesn’t that exist? questions (namely those pertaining to evil) by referencing created persons. Well, why can’t it be that easy? Why can’t we say that the reason everything exists is God, and the reason that our decisions sometimes lack due respect for proper values is ourselves? We can say that God provides the causal power—or if we want to use traditional theological language, God provides the grace— for us to do the right thing and we sometimes reject it. In making the sinner the explanation for the sin, we are not ascribing to a creature the power of independently making something part of the real world; we’re saying she can independently (on her own initiative, not God’s) prevent something from being part of the real world. We’ll call this the Creaturely Resistance Account (CRA). Jacques Maritain, a major twentieth-century representative for CRA, argues that while God takes full responsibility for everything in creation, the free creature can initiate sin through a kind of radical autonomy when it comes to “refusal”: God cannot be the cause of evil itself or privation, or of the mutilation which deforms my act; of this it is I who am the first cause. Evil as such is the only thing I am able to do without God, by withdrawing myself, as it were, as if by an initiative emanating from my nothingness, from the current of Divine causality. In the line of evil-doing, the creature is first cause. Without me you can do nothing (John 15:5). This is true in two senses: without God we cannot do anything; we can without him do nothing. The first initiative towards good acts comes always from God, so that there the initiative of created freedom has its origin in the initiative of God. But by reason of the power to refuse, which is a natural element of all created freedom, the first initiative to evil-doing always comes from the creature. (Maritain, trans. Richard O’Sullivan 1935: 81–82)3

The idea sounds simple at first. God provides the causal power the creature requires to be all that it should be and to do all that it should do. Sometimes,

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however, the creature nihilates by resisting God’s causal power, and remains in a state of arrested moral (and existential) development. This original defect then extends itself across the character of the moral subject and along the consequences of its actions. When someone fails morally, it is not because God provided less, or a different kind of, causal power than when someone succeeds morally—it’s because in the one case God’s gift of morally relevant existence was at least partially rejected by the subject, whereas in the other case it was fully accepted. As I read Maritain, God’s grace is therefore metaphysically sufficient4 for the person to do the right thing, insofar as if the person does the right thing God’s activity is a complete causal explanation of the person’s morally good activity. On the other hand, God’s grace is not logically sufficient for the person to do the right thing, insofar as God might provide the same causal power and the person might not end up fully morally realized. In which case the final explanation for evil is that the free creature rejected God’s grace. The difficulty surfaces when we ask in what, exactly, this rejection of God’s causal offerings (or “nihilation”5) consists. The verb itself sounds like a positive act, not simply the absence of activity on the creature’s part. And this activity, if it is an activity, is supposed to be the first appearance of and ultimate explanation for all evil in every time and place. It has a lot to answer for, and it seems dubious that it could serve as an explanation if it were really just another euphemism for a kind of absence. Put it this way: it seems like nihilation must be a real act on the part of the creature because if it weren’t a real act, if the creature simply remained inactive and therefore passive, then God’s causal activity would meet with no resistance and would naturally take its course and prompt the creature to do the right thing. If, on the other hand, God’s causal power is being blocked from achieving its end in the soul, then it seems as though it must be something real that blocks it. Suppose we put a glass under a running faucet, and suppose further that before the glass is filled, someone else puts a fitted lid over the top of the glass, preventing any more water from entering the glass. Obviously, a result of affixing the lid is that part of the glass will remain unfilled. If we want a filled glass, we will lament this absence of water in the glass and regard it as a privation. But clearly what caused this original privation is not merely a privation—not something absent, but something newly present, namely, the lid. So too, if we’re

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saying that the origin of evil is real resistance on the part of the creature, a real refusal of the existential plenitude God offers, and a real blockage of divine causality, then it doesn’t seem sensible to call that resistance a mere lack. But if nihilation is something real, then it can only receive its reality from God the universal source of all existence, which would make God the author of evil (if there were something that existed even though God didn’t cause it, we’d be right back at dualism and God would only be one power competing with others, instead of the absolute all-powerful God of orthodox theism). Again, if nihilation isn’t an existing thing then it’s hard to see how it could be responsible for anything, let alone how it could prevent divine causality from having its full effect. On the other hand, if nihilation is an existing thing then like all existing things God must be the cause of it and so God must be responsible for it. Steven Long puts the alternative starkly: The negation in question is constituted either by something positive or by the lack of something positive. But if it is constituted by something positive then it is received from God, and so God causes this negation. And if it is constituted by the lack of something positive (as both Maritain and St. Thomas hold), then God has not bestowed that positive gift that would constitute the contrary of this negation … We are simply looking the implications of “be” and “not-be” directly in the face. Negation as such must be either something positive or the absence of something positive; negation must be either something the creature does or something it does not do: the law of excluded middle permits no other possibility … there is no tertia via hovering between being and non-being that eludes the twilight zone of the excluded middle. (Long 2006: 582–583)

Long’s argument represents a very serious objection to the CRA. In trying to answer it, let me begin by suggesting an image: Suppose there is a rock which in its natural state maintains a fairly tepid temperature. Suppose further that by applying fire to the rock we can cause a notable rise in the temperature of the rock, the rock’s increased warmth being due to its contact with the fire. Now suppose there were two structurally identical rocks, and that the same fire was brought, under identical conditions, into equidistant proximity with both rocks at the same time. Imagine that while both rocks grew warmer than their normal temperature, and that both failed to reach the same temperature as the fire itself, one rock reached a much

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higher temperature under these conditions than the other. This would be, scientifically and philosophically, a very unsatisfactory state of affairs, since ex hypothesi nothing (at least nothing in the material conditions) could explain the discrepancy between the two rocks. In fact, it is so unsatisfactory that I doubt whether people generally would consider themselves intellectually satisfied if they encountered a situation that appeared to mirror the one I have described. I think it more likely that the “two rocks” problem would be perpetually studied (as in fact seemingly indeterminate events at the quantum level are still studied) in order to see if anything could be discovered about what was responsible for the difference. If no explanation of the difference in determination was forthcoming from the natural level, the supernatural might be invoked. In any case, although researchers would look for some account of the discrepancy, there would be no mystery as to where the heat came from or where the coolness came from: in the case of both rocks, regardless of the discrepancy of temperature, their failure to reach the same heat as the fire was due to their natural coolness, while whatever heat they had above their normal state would be imputed to the fire. Now suppose the same scenario, but supposed that both rocks are intelligent and, somehow, communicative. Suppose we asked the cooler rock why it didn’t become as warm as its fellow. If the rock were to say, “I just didn’t. I could have gotten warmer, but I consciously didn’t,” we would probably pry it with further questions. Was it an issue of motivation? Was it a matter of internal configuration? What made it not get as warm as it might have given the available heat? It might insist, “No, it wasn’t anything like that. If you want I could say that I chose not to get warmer, or that I resisted the warmth of the fire, or that I nullified the effect of the fire on myself, or that I inhibited the velocity of my atomic movements. But all that means is that I simply didn’t get warmer, even though under the circumstances I could have.” My suggestion is that while we would be inclined to dismiss such a theory in the case of unintelligent rocks, if intelligent, communicative rocks assured us that this was the only way to understand their own temperature discrepancy, we should be more willing to accept their testimony. The talking rocks should know—it’s their experience. The analogy might work better if the rocks started out at a temperature of absolute zero, since that corresponds to the complete lack of existence of

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creatures before God exerts creative causality over them. Anyway, regarding the phenomenon of sin: a created person begins as a nonexistent, then it comes to exist, and as time goes on its various individual properties come into being (e.g., the person grows up) or cease to exist (e.g., the person goes bald). But at certain points God provides an influx of causal power in order to create or sustain a particular property with a key moral role. It doesn’t matter at the moment to which human faculty this property primarily pertains. God may be acting so as to cause an intellectual attentiveness regarding the application of moral principles to the person’s concrete situation, or a particular rectitude of the will in the selection of a particular course of action. The important thing is that, speaking in meinongian terms, there is some property of a created person which remains nonexistent, although the person is conscious that the circumstances are such that the moral property (whether we call it a moral attention of the intellect or moral rectitude of the will) could have come to exist in those very circumstances in which it remained nonexistent. Furthermore, because that property does not come to exist, other things/events that would have followed in its wake also remain nonexistent, starting the long train of moral and natural evil. Long finds this description of sin insupportable: “It makes no sense to say that the same causal influx that yields being may just as well yield non-being” (Long 2006: 589). I might be inclined to agree, except that we have the implicit testimony of the creatures themselves, as we had it earlier and explicitly with the hypothetical talking rocks. When people knowingly choose to do the right thing, they point to all kinds of reasons and influences outside themselves, and believers particularly allude to divine aid. By contrast, when people admit that they freely chose what they knew to be the wrong thing—that is to say, when they acknowledge guilt, and not just ignorance or compulsion—they find themselves unable to offer an explanation. They “just didn’t do the right thing,” or “have no excuse.” “Excuse,” its literal etymology signifying “from a cause,” suggests an instinctive recognition on the part of voluntary wrongdoers that causal factors can’t provide the reason for their moral deficiency—thus, they have no excuse.6 God didn’t make them sin, either by unaccountably causing some concretely existing barrier to divine grace itself, or by withholding the causal power requisite to acting rightly. Clearly, whatever property it is that remains uncreated in sin cannot have a merely superficial relationship to the personality of the sinner, otherwise the

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person as a whole couldn’t hold herself responsible, nor be held responsible by others. Henri Bergson, in his enormously influential but now sadly neglected work on free will (Bergson 1913), describes free choice as an emergent property of consciousness to which all the various elements of the personality contribute. I have already written on how this description of free will can shed light on the divine free choice to create (Miravalle 2015), but we can also apply it to the problem of moral evil. If the nonexistent feature of the person in question is something genuinely (but not really) formed by and forming of all the aspects of a person’s character, then the failure of this feature to come into being would mean that the whole human personality is perversely unresponsive to God’s existential generosity. And because the personality didn’t have to be unresponsive, didn’t have to be defective, it is responsible. Certainly, everything said thus far could be said, and said consistently, by a non-meinongian, albeit probably with some different turns of phrase. But I think, at least, that the meinongian has some advantage in answering two likely objections to CRA, namely (a) how can what doesn’t exist resist God? and (b) doesn’t successful creaturely resistance to divine grace imply that God’s will is thwarted; that the creature is, at least in this case, stronger than God, and that consequently omnipotence should only be loosely attributed to God if at all? In other words, the first objection argues that creaturely resistance to divine causality is impossible based on the nature of creatures, while the second objection argues that creaturely resistance to divine causality is impossible based on the nature of God. Beginning with the first objection: CRA presents the creature as capable of resisting divine causality, as able to be non-responsive to an influx of divine causality. But a creature can’t resist on its own, says the objector, and it can’t be non-responsive on its own, for the straightforward reason that it can’t do anything on its own. It can’t decide anything on its own, can’t determine anything on its own, can’t refuse or accept anything on its own. Why not? Because a creature can’t even exist on its own. That’s what it means to be a creature in the first place. Everything a creature does or doesn’t do depends on its existence, and that existence comes from God. More precisely, the way a creature exists is determined by the way God makes it to exist. A creature can no more form itself according to a pattern than an effect can be its own cause, since ultimately designing and causing are equivalent: making something to be

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a certain way is the same as making it to be at all. Therefore, only the one who makes creatures can be ultimately responsible for the way creatures are, and consequently the personal character of every human being must be ultimately due to God’s activity. To this the meinongian theist has a ready answer: it is not the case that God makes things to be what they are; God makes things exist, but what they are is determined by, or rather is equivalent to, the things in question. God does not make an existing horse a horse—God makes it an existent. God applies causal power to nonexistents and if the nonexistents respond to that causal power, if they react by existing, then they enter the real world and enter it as themselves. So, the character of a sinner is ultimately due to the character of the sinner, and not to God—although it is to God that the sinner owes existence. Probably, the primary motivation of the objection we are considering is the inability to conceive how something which doesn’t exist could offer up resistance. This inability is, I think, due to or at least exacerbated by two mistaken images of nonexistence. The first image is of nonexistence as pure nothing, as pure void or absence. Clearly, nothing can’t do anything, can’t choose anything, can’t determine itself in any way, and can’t take ultimate responsibility for its decisions. However, as I’ve already argued in several chapters, this definition of nothing is absurd. It is, in fact, unthinkable—to think of nothing is just not to think—and therefore the “nothing” out of which God makes the world cannot be this non-thing brand of “nothing.” So, no one should accuse proponents of CRA as implying that the explanation for sin is that nothing resists divine agency. The other misguided image of nonexistence is that of a sea of potentiality, a kind of potter’s clay or elemental play-dough out of which the divine demiurge can fashion creatures. Now it would be highly counterintuitive to suggest that a lump of amorphousness could shape itself, determine itself, and decide its destiny. Clay lacks the wherewithal to tell the potter what kind of a pot it wants to be, let alone to stolidly resist the potter’s actual molding. We simply don’t look for initiative from inanimate, unintelligent realities, as the first example of the unaccountably tepid rock was meant to illustrate. But making potentiality into a kind of pre-existing prime matter, a primordial stuff out of which God creates, is clearly contrary to the ex nihilo tradition of creation. Only God pre-exists creation. As I argued in Chapter 6,

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it is more consistent with the orthodox understanding of creation, particularly as biblically expressed, to say that nonexisting objects are the targets of God’s creative activity. In which case there is no question of an inanimate, unintelligent thing offering resistance at any level: what resists divine causality is an intelligent, free person. And from a free person we expect initiative and to a free person we attribute responsibility. If God gives the person the means to become fully actualized, and if the person does not become fully actualized, there should be no difficulty about saying that the person is to blame for the existentially arrested development of his or her character. It must be that Long is attached to one of these images of non-being; hence his absolute insistence that CRA violates the principle of excluded middle by positing something that is neither being or non-being. Of course nothing of the kind has been done. Presumably, Long takes it for granted that non-being is equivalent to nothing, or at least to nothing definite. Were that the case he would be quite right to object that no resistance to causal activity could come from non-being. But he’s not right; non-being is something, and something definite. Moreover, some non-beings are persons, and persons are precisely the kind of things that can knowingly resist what is good for them. And when they do so resist, they become not something that is neither being nor non-being, but something that is in different ways both being and non-being, that is, a thing whose essential features exist even though certain crucial moral features do not. Now to the second objection that the resistance of creatures to divine activity entails that the divine will is frustrated, which runs counter to the doctrine of divine omnipotence. If God is trying to make someone good, and that person remains morally defective despite God’s efforts, then God is foiled. But God cannot be foiled, and therefore a created person cannot resist God’s causal activity. Suppose we examine this objection in meinongian terms. What it says, essentially, is that for God to provide the causally sufficient activity for something to exist in conjunction with the failure of that thing’s existence entails a frustration of God’s will. But notice that neither half of this conjunction involves a frustration of God’s will. God often provides the causally sufficient activity for something to exist. This occurs, in fact, every time something is created—every time something

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comes into existence. So, clearly, God providing the causally sufficient activity for something to exist doesn’t constitute a frustration of God’s will. It also frequently happens that something fails to exist. Unicorns, for instance, fail to exist. So do all other fictional objects. But no one would say that the failure of unicorns to exist constitutes a frustration of the divine will. The question is, then, if neither God’s decision to supply something with existentially sufficient causality nor the nonexistence of something constitute the frustration of the divine will, why should their conjunction? The objector will answer that the difficulty lies in describing a scenario in which the selfsame object with which God is supplying existentially sufficient causality is also the object which does not come (fully) into being. In other words, God is trying to make the person good, and the person’s failure to be good means that God has been unsuccessful. These issues have basically been covered already in the previous chapter. To say God is “unsuccessfully trying” to make someone good would be a mischaracterization of the situation. If God knows from all eternity that the person in question will not become a fully actualized/morally good agent, then it is inaccurate to say that God is trying to fully actualize them or make them morally good. God will not try to make happen what he already knows will not happen. Better to say that what God is “trying” to do is give the person in question the opportunity to be morally good, to be fully actualized, to be everything she should be. And insofar as the person is in fact given causally (though not logically) sufficient causal means, God is successful in his aims. For the final time, let us admit that nonexisting things can’t have a real causal impact on real things. Creatures, since they all begin at the level of fictional objects, can’t be responsible for a divine determination, for the structure of God’s knowledge, or for the decisions of God’s will. The creaturely refusal of God’s grace doesn’t alter God’s plans, or frustrate God’s hopes. If God knows everything that can be, everything that will be, and everything that would have been, he is acting on complete information when he arranges the providential scheme and the story of the universe. I am far less convinced that meinongianism lends as much clarity to the problem of evil as to the other issues already discussed in this book. That’s why I left evil for the end. Still, it seems to me that it offers some benefits. It provides a logical framework in which it’s more natural to talk about what doesn’t but

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ought to exist—which is key for the privation approach to evil. Second, when dealing with the phenomenon of sin, which the tradition largely sees as the beginning and primary form of evil, meinongianism depicts the sinner (or the saint) as possessing, even in her native nonexistence, the character of an intelligent person capable of freely resisting God’s offer of complete realization. And these benefits, although probably not crucial in discussions on the problem of evil, are also not insignificant.

Conclusion

Let me address one final objection that many readers may still harbor. I have tried in the preceding chapters to demonstrate that the proposed model of meinongian theism does not jeopardize the causal dependency of creatures on God. If finite things exist, it is only because God has caused them to exist. If he hadn’t supplied them with existence, they wouldn’t exist. So far so good. But I expect it will be protested that despite my insistence that created things depend on God for their being, the problem remains that on my view they do not depend on God for their intrinsic character. The character of finite things, on the meinongianism reading I defend, would have been largely the same (minus existence) whether or not God had made them to be. While it is up to God to determine what things will exist, it is not up to God to determine what things are like in themselves. A unicorn or a horse or anything else is what it is whether God makes it to exist or not. In which case, isn’t it true that the system championed in this book establishes an order that is independent, and to that extent, rival to the divine order? Don’t I portray the character of things—not their existence, but their character—as being independent of the universal cause? Well it’s true I don’t think the natures of things are dependent on God’s creative choices. But I think it’s also misleading to talk of the characters of things as being “independent” of God. That makes it sound as though the characters of things exist independently of God, which of course I think they don’t. (And, as I’ve already argued, even nonexistents depend on God in the scenarios of which they are a part. That dependence on God is one of the many nonexisting properties that finite nonexistents possess.) Better to say, then, not that finite things have characters which are independent of God, but that finite things would be different from God even if he hadn’t created them.

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Why is it so important that nonexistents have a sufficiently basic character to distinguish them from God? Let me illustrate the issue by citing a mystical experience recounted in the life of Catherine of Siena. Her biographer describes an event where Catherine was told by God, “Do you know, daughter, who you are, and who I am? If you know these two things you will be blessed. You are she who is not; whereas I am He who is” (Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb, 2003, 79). Prescinding from the authenticity of the experience, how could this teaching be most charitably interpreted? Presumably, God is not telling Catherine that she is, in fact, a nonexistent. More plausibly, the point of the revelation is that Catherine might not have existed, that she would not have existed were it not for God’s creative generosity. Suppose we paraphrase the last part of the reported revelation to make it express this point more precisely. Let’s have God say, “I exist on my own, but without my causal activity you would not exist.” My concern is to make sense of the second half of the conjunction. How do we interpret “without my causal activity you would not exist”? A fictional object realist, it seems to me, is forced to interpret the clause as “without my causal activity, you would be an abstract object, or a social construct, or existing denizen of another world, or an aspect of someone else’s mind.” Surely a bizarre pronouncement. A fictional object nominalist, it seems to me, is forced to interpret the clause as “without my causal activity, you would be not something.” But the phrase “not something” patently doesn’t refer to anything. And if it doesn’t refer to anything, then it doesn’t refer at all.1 In which case the counterfactual predicate applied to Catherine is left blank. Therefore, on fictional object nominalism, the pronouncement doesn’t express a complete thought. The upshot is that non-meinongian approaches to fictional objects threaten the cogency of the possible nonexistence of creatures. But the principle that without God’s creative generosity we finite creatures would not exist seems to be a fundamental tenet of orthodox theism. Such a principle presupposes that we can meaningfully contrast the default state of God (existing) with the default state of creatures (nonexisting). This, it seems to me, is the point of the revelation to Catherine.

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Now to achieve that contrast—or any contrast—it’s required that two genuine things enter into the evaluation. One term isn’t enough for contrast. You can’t win a race if you’re running against nobody. It makes no sense to emphasize the southerness of a place that’s south of nowhere. So too, the default state of a creature can’t be profitably contrasted with God’s default state if the default, nonexisting state of the creature is depicted as equivalent to being nothing. After all, appreciation for God’s grandeur isn’t enhanced by proclaiming that God is naturally greater than nothing. Catherine was told she would be blessed if she knew God as he whose default state it is to exist and herself as she whose default state it is to not exist. Clarifying and heightening this primordial contrast between God and creatures has been the objective of this book. Since meinongianism engages creatures in their native state of nonexistence, I believe it can facilitate this contrast better than any competing metaphysical system. If so, then far from infringing on the sovereignty of God, meinongian theism preserves the radical, ultimate supremacy of God in comparison with all finite things, whether existing or nonexisting.

Notes Chapter 1 1

Thanks to the anonymous reviewer for reminding me that the ancients didn’t think about unicorns as fictional objects, nor as “horses with horns,” but as horned animals with, sometimes, the body of a horse. Nonetheless, I’ll continue to refer to them as “horses with horns” or “horned horses” since “horned animals with, sometimes, the body of a horse” is too cumbersome to repeat.

2

We are dealing in this chapter with his mature thought on nonexistents. Early on in his career, Russell’s convictions appear much closer to meinongianism. Cf. (Jager 1972: 53ff and Jacquette 2009). For an argument that Russell’s early work was never seriously committed to things which don’t exist, cf. (Makin 2009).

3

The tiger example is found in (Russell 1973: 227), and the example of Timbuctoo residents is found in (Russell 1956: 234).

4

Cf. (Swanson 2011: 46): “Existential claims, again, say nothing about particular

5

Cf. (Moore 1936: 183–184); (Carnap, trans. Arthur Pap, 1959: 73–74); (Quine

individuals. Instead, they say something about a class or propositional functions.” [1948] 2004: 181–183). 6

The same applies to individuals; when I say “Sherlock Holmes is rational, but the Hound of the Baskervilles is not” I don’t mean “Sherlock Holmes, if he exists, is rational, but the Hound of the Baskervilles, if he exists is not” anymore than when I say “Donald Trump is president of the United States, and Hilary Clinton isn’t” I mean “Donald Trump, if he exists, is president of the United States, and Hilary Clinton, if she exists, isn’t.”

7

Russell compares the absurdity of saying that a particular man exists to saying that a particular man is numerous (1971: 164). The disparity between the two cases should now be obvious: there is not in one particular man anything that makes “Men are numerous” true; but there is in the fact of one particular (existing) man something that makes “Men exist” true.

8

Cf. (Parsons 1980: 33–37).

9

It might be objected that horses and unicorns are sufficiently similar that it would be plausible to wish simply that one of the existing horses in the real

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world had a horn and that one could ride that horse. In response we can just substitute a more exotic fictional creature, like a chimera. No one who wishes it were possible to ride a chimera is wishing to modify an existing thing in the real world—no existing thing in the real world is sufficiently like a chimera for it to be plausible that a person who states “I wish I could ride a chimera” is, in fact, wishing about one of the existing things in the world. 10 It should be noted that Walton strongly disassociates himself with a pretense theory that sees all fiction resulting from pretended assertions; instead he prefers to present fiction as a result of the more general behavior of make-believe (Walton, 1990: 81–82). 11 Thus, a paraphrase of what we are communicating to listeners by saying, “Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral” is “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is such that one who engages in pretense of kind K [the kind of pretense one engages in when one utters ‘Tom Sawyer attended his own funeral’ in a spirit of pretense] in a game authorized for it makes it fictional of himself in that game that he speaks truly” (Walton 1990: 400). 12 The technical way to put it is, “There is a degree of fame such that no real detective is famous to that degree, and to pretend in a certain manner [in the manner in which one who says ‘Sherlock Holmes is famous to that degree’ normally would be pretending] in a game authorized for the Sherlock Holmes stories is fictionally to speak truly” (Walton 1990: 414). 13 Cf. (Walton 1990: 420–430). 14 Kroon makes a similar criticism of Walton’s theory in (Kroon 1996: 179–180). 15 For example, Kroon and Pünjer. Cf. (Kroon 2000). 16 Kroon compares a negative existential to a paradoxical, but meaningful, exclamation, “Look, that woman’s not a woman at all!” (Kroon 2000: 105–106). The difference, of course, is that one can paraphrase this exclamation so that it ceases to be paradoxical (“Look, that person who looks like a woman is actually a man”), whereas there’s no way this can be done with the irreducibly basic form of negative existentials. 17 He appeals to this pretend logic in answering van Inwagen’s objection that fictional characters seem to have a quantification structure which allows for valid logical implications to obtain between them, cf. (Walton 1990: 416–419). 18 Obviously a non-pretense theorist argument may be made to the effect that the ancient Greeks were not petitioning Zeus, but were instead unknowingly petitioning their own idea of Zeus. This argument will be dealt with in the next chapter.

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19 For another example of how talk of fictional things can provide evidence for truths which do not refer to fictions, cf. (Azzouni 2010: 119–120). 20 Cf. (Maritain, trans. Gerald B. Phelan 1995: 89): “Thus it is clear that the history of thought, at least to the extent that it is progressive, is composed of a series of scandals for common sense, each of which is followed by a higher reintegration, conquest, and victory for common sense. Each of our steps upon earth is itself an incipient fall followed by a regaining of balance.” 21 Graham Priest (2011) points out, and I think quite rightly, that Azzouni’s solution to fictional objects could be plausibly used to reach the conclusion not only that fictional objects are bogus, but that there’s no intrinsic legitimacy even to the idea of real objects.

Chapter 2 1

Thomas Hofweber (2000: 252–253) uses a similar framing device to present the core distinction between meinongians and fictional object nominalists.

2

Salmon distinguishes between fiction and myth by whether or not the inventor of the fictional object knows that what she has invented is fictional. Thus, Doyle knows that he has invented Sherlock Holmes, and he merely pretends that Sherlock Holmes is a man (Salmon [2002] 2005b: 77), whereas Babinet did not know he had created an abstract artifact/fictional object when he postulated the planet Vulcan (Salmon [1998] 2005a: 101).

3

I am assuming, of course, that Dido, or at least her suicide as recounted by Virgil, is fictional and not historical—even though, as I understand it, the historicity of Dido is a somewhat disputed point among scholars.

4

“actio intellectus etiam humani, se extendit ad aliquid etiam quando illud non est.”

5

“eo quod cuilibet intellectui vero oportet quod respondeat aliquod ens, et e converso.” The tension in Aquinas between this epistemological principle and the knowledge of fictional objects has been noted by Gloria Wasserman (2007).

6

“Omnis autem essentia vel quiditas potest intelligi sine hoc quod aliquid intelligatur de esse suo; possum enim intelligere quid est homo vel Phoenix et tamen ignorare an esse habeat in rerum natura.”

7

“Dicimus enim non entia esse intelligibilia vel opinabilia, aut etiam concupiscibilia, sed non dicimus ea esse mota.”

8

“necesse est quod quicunque scit quod quid est esse hominis, vel cuiuscunque alterius rei, quod sciat rem illam esse. Quia enim non entis non est aliqua quidditas vel essentia, de eo quod non est, nullus potest scire quod quid est… impossibile

Notes

163

est scire quod quid est Hircocervi, quia nihil est tale in rerum natura… Sed ad cognitionem quod quid est requiritur cognitio quia est, ut dictum est.” Notice that here the goatstag is not said to be unknowable because of some metaphysical or logical impossibility, but because “there is no such thing in the natural world.” 9 “Unde manifestum est quod sicut nos habemus ad cognoscendum quia est aliquid, ita nos habemus ad cognoscendum quid est.” 10 Cf. (de Ver. 2.8), where the intentional distinction is presented quite differently: things which do not exist, nor have existed nor ever will exist, are known only through speculative knowledge, whereas things which do exist can also be known through practical knowledge. 11 “Sic igitur non entia cognoscit Deus inquantum aliquo modo habent esse.” 12 “quod quamvis quod nec est, nec fuit, nec erit, non habeat esse determinatum in se, est tamen determinate in Dei cognition.” 13 “Quod illa quae nec fuerunt, nec sunt, nec erunt, sunt aliquo modo existentia in potentia Dei sicut in principio activo, vel in bonitate eius sicut in causa finali.” Cf. (Sum. contr. gent. 1.66): “enim quae non sunt nec erunt nec fuerunt, a Deo sciuntur quasi eius virtuti possibilia. Unde non cognoscit ea ut existentia aliqualiter in seipsis, sed ut existentia solum in potentia divina.” 14 “Deus scit omnia quaecumque sunt quocumque modo. Nihil autem prohibet ea quae non sunt simpliciter, aliquo modo esse. Simpliciter enim sunt, quae actu sunt. Ea vero quae non sunt actu, sunt in potentia vel ipsius Dei, vel creaturae; sive in potentia activa, sive in passiva, sive in potentia opinandi, vel imaginandi, vel quocumque modo significandi. Quaecumque igitur possunt per creaturam fieri vel cogitari vel dici, et etiam quaecumque ipse facere potest, omnia cognoscit Deus, etiam si actu non sint. Et pro tanto dici potest quod habet etiam non entium scientiam.” Note that by the time he writes the Summa, Aquinas is willing to say that nonexistents can be objects of at least God’s “knowledge” and “cognizance.” 15 In the case of God, he possesses the ideas not only of all nonexistent species, but of all nonexistent individuals; cf. (de Ver. 3.8, c. and ad. 1); (Sum. theol. 1.15.3, c. and ad. 4). 16 Azzouni (2010: 102) “Instead of Pegasus, one suggests that the topic is the word ‘Pegasus’ or the idea of Pegasus—in short, one or another psychological/verbal vehicle about Pegasus. But neither of these is the subject matter of sentences or thoughts about Pegasus, in any case. No more so are perceptual vehicles such as sensory impressions, the qualities of one’s experience, and so on, the objects of awareness in the case of hallucinatory experience. The subject matter of such an experience is the nonexistent items seen; not the experience of such.”

164

Notes

17 “Quaedam enim sunt quae secundum esse totum completum sunt extra animam; et hujusmodi sunt entia completa, sicut homo et lapis. Quaedam autem sunt quae nihil habent extra animam, sicut somnia et imaginatio Chimerae.” 18 Although I have tried to give both an accurate and a sympathetic presentation of Aquinas’s theory of fictional objects here, the literature on thomistic metaphysics is immense and a full treatment would require delving deeply into profoundly controversial themes, principally the essence–existence distinction, the notion of ens reale vs. ens rationis, and the analogy of being. A staggering amount has been written on how these principles function in the thomistic corpus, and so I must allow this relatively brief exposition of his explicit treatment of fictional objects to stand as it is to avoid making the entire work one of thomistic hermeneutics. But even if a thomist reader believes I have misread Aquinas’s position on the matter, I think the position I have attributed to Aquinas is in fact the most compelling position available for representing the common-sense view that fictional objects exist as ideas in the mind. 19 In other contexts, Aquinas acknowledges that what is known and that by which it is known (the idea in the mind) are different things (e.g., de Pot. 9.1), but he seems not to address the difficulties this distinction poses for his account of fictional objects and how we know them.

Chapter 3 1

Cf., for instance, (Bernard Bolzano, trans. Rolf George 1972: 20–22, 189–190).

2

Cf., Burge (1974: 313): “The pre-theoretic notion seems to be that true predications at the most basic level express comments on topics, or attributions of properties or relations to objects: lacking a topic or object, basic predications cannot be true.” Meinongianism, however, holds that predications concerning nonexistents don’t lack an object, they simply lack an existing object.

3

He also points out, as do others (e.g., McMichael and Zalta 1980: 298) that another key intuition is that nonexisting things don’t have properties, or at least don’t have them in the same way existing things do. We’ll deal with that intuition in time.

4

Gareth Evans (1982: 358–359), although a pretense theorist, acknowledges that it is precisely existentially creative make-believe, or a game where “the pretence is not that something which there is is other than it is, but that there is something which in fact there isn’t,” which is most likely to stir our emotions.

Notes

165

5

I use “real” here as a synonym for “existing,” and not for “genuine” or “legitimate,”

6

Let me further state, without arguing for it, that I regard the assertion of

as in Austin (1962: 62–77). contraries (e.g., “the square is round”) and the ascription of contradictory predicates (e.g., “the thing which is square is also non-square”) as entailing full-fledged sentence contradictions (e.g., “it is the case that this is a square, and it is not the case that this is a square”). Philosophers who disagree with this system of implication, or who are comfortable with contradictions obtaining in certain cases, will find the contradiction objection to meinongianism even less formidable than I do (see Parsons 1974: 573; Smith 2002: 246–247). 7

It’s of course argued that we do use contradictions in certain logical settings. For example, in the strategy of the reductio ad absurdum and the admonition ex contradictione quodlibet. But I think these principles can be invoked without the positing of contradictory things. For instance, reduction ad absurdum needn’t mean, “Don’t say this, or you’ll end up positing a contradiction”; it could just mean, “Don’t say this, or you’ll end saying nonsense.” Ex contradictione quodlibet needn’t mean “If you posit a contradictory thing you’ll be able to use it to prove anything”; it could simply mean, “If you contradict yourself you’ll be able to use those contradictory affirmations in tandem to prove anything.”

8

For instance, Meinong’s original effort to deal with the problem of “the existent round square” is by distinguishing between nuclear and extranuclear properties, cf. (Jacquette 1994: 236–237).

9

For instance (Donnellan 1974). Everett (2000; 2013: 88–102), because he is a pretense theorist, does not believe we are ever talking about the same fictional object, yet argues that the criterion for whether we are supposed to be pretending that we’re talking about the same fictional object depends on whether our pretense is taking place within the same “ungrounded network” (Everett 2013: 88–102) or based on the same “reference-fixing source” (Everett 2000). In other words, if our pretense is causally dependent on the same origin, then we’re pretending to talk and think about the same thing.

10 Burge (1974: 310–311) notes that “When native speakers are asked whether ‘Pegasus is winged’ is true, they rely on common knowledge and contexual clues to determine what the questioner intends.” But of course we rely on common knowledge and contextual clues to determine what the questioner intends by asking whether “Ghandi was lean.” This reliance doesn’t qualify the affirmative answer due to both questions, as Burge seems to suggest is the case with fictional objects.

166

Notes

11 Priest makes the same point with Doyle and Sherlock Holmes: “Doyle was the first to imagine Holmes, and indeed, to give the character imagined that name, which we now use to refer to him. That is, he was the first to bear that particular intentional relation to him, in virtue of which we now imagine Holmes” (Priest 2005: 120).

Chapter 4 1

As we will acknowledge in greater detail in the next chapter, “ontological argument” often refers to arguments that do not make use of the notion of perfection. Still, since so many ontological arguments do make use of perfection, beginning with Anselm’s, we may allow ourselves to use the term traditionally, if not precisely.

2

It might be pointed out that in traditional Byzantine theology (and in Swinburne 1994: 185), the Father is said to necessarily cause the Son and yet be distinct from him—does this not show that necessary causation can obtain between two distinct things? Perhaps, but the doctrine of the trinity is admittedly fraught with mystery and involves sui generis subject matter. More than that, the necessary “causation” between Father and Son is traditionally held to imply the equal divinity of Father and Son—and in fact Gregory Palamas warns that creation must not be necessarily caused by God, or the undesirable consequence would follow that creatures were as divine as the trinitarian persons (cf., Gregory Palamas, The One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz 1988: 197).

3

For responses to the objection that concrete particulars don’t exist, see Chapter 1.

4

On the haecceity of fictional objects, cf. (Lycan 2015).

5

Someone once communicated to me with great conviction that while the question “Why is the Parthenon not an idea in the mind?” is an admittedly absurd question, the question “Why is the Parthenon not a mere idea in the mind?” (or “Why is the Parthenon not merely an idea in the mind?”) is a perfectly sensible question. This seems to me a simply magical employment of “mere” or “merely.” If it is incoherent that x should be y, how could it not be incoherent that x should be merely y? What does “merely” add here that makes sense of what is otherwise a category mistake? If it is self-evident that blue is not Wednesday, why isn’t it equally self-evident that blue is not merely Wednesday?

Notes

167

Chapter 5 1

(Priest 2005: viii and 14; Azzouni 2010: 158).

2

For example, (Lopston 1980: 189; King 1984: 11). Cf., the various references given in Heathwood (2011: 346) of recent philosophers who claim that the meinongian position—that existence is a property possessed by some things and not by others—is no key part of the ontological argument.

3

Peter King (1984: 11), in a fairly desperate effort to preserve Anselm from implicit meinongianism, proposes that the linguistic descriptions of objects of thought would actually be the objects of thought. As though anyone, particularly Anselm, means by “God” a collection of sentences or propositions.

4

(Malcolm [1960] 1965: 138; García de la Sienra 2000; van Inwagen 2012: 4–5).

5

Cf., Etienne Gilson, as quoted by (Malcolm [1960] 1965: 156, fn. 35): “To show that the affirmation of necessary existence is analytically implied in the idea of God would be … to show that God is necessary if He exists, but would not prove that He does exist.”

6

Cf., Rowe’s example of a “ventinling,” that is, an existing doctor who cares for animals and speaks their language ([1975] 1998: 187–190). Rowe allows that we can assert that a ventinling doesn’t fail to exist, as long as we mean by this that “ventinling” is not a true description of any nonexistent. Nor, of course, is it a true description of any existing thing. Rowe has no trouble with saying, however, that Dr. Doolittle is a nonexisting doctor who cares for animals and speaks their language, making his position clearly meinongian.

7

Hartshorne rightly notes that “it is to the credit of the ontological argument that it has to be opposed by making an absolute disjunction between meaning and its referent … a disjunction at no point mediated by a higher principle” ([1941] 1964: 310–311).

8

In his evaluation of the revised ontological argument, Hick (1967: 348–351) makes essentially the de re/de dicto distinction (which he terms, respectively, “ontological necessity” and “logical necessity”), but in failing to recognize that de dicto necessity supervenes on de re necessity, he denies that there can be a genuine reductio to a logical contradiction by beginning with the premise that God or “that which is perfect” doesn’t exist.

9

In the seventh chapter, I will argue that God’s possession of existence as an essential feature can be more precisely understood as God being identical to existence itself.

10 Swinburne (2012: 357) finds it incredible that the denial of God’s existence could entail a contradiction in terms, since then other seemingly coherent phrases

168

Notes that entail God’s nonexistence (such as “The only substances are four mutually repelling steel balls”) would also involve self-contradiction. But some selfcontradictions require a lot of unpacking to reveal their logical incoherence— think of complicated mathematical formulas that, upon diligent analysis, are found to be as absurd as 2 + 2 = 5. It shouldn’t be surprising if the same holds true in other logical fields—a seemingly coherent affirmation is revealed, upon extensive analysis, to hide a contradiction.

Chapter 6 1 Cf., for instance, John Dillon’s discussion of Plutarch’s cosmology (1996: 206–208). 2 Cf., for instance, the declaration at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that God “from the beginning of time made at once out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal” (in Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, #800, Peter Hünermann (ed.), Robert Fastiggi, Anne Englund Nash (eds., English Edition 2012), 266). 3 Note that this argument is not tied to A-theoretical commitments about time. B-theorists may hold that all events are compresent to God, and that God wills whatever he wills about creation and providence from all eternity, and yet still accept that there can be change insofar as a state of affairs obtains at a certain point in time which did not obtain prior to that point. 4 Although, a significant number of biblical scholars do find creatio ex nihilo inconsistent with Genesis (cf., Oord 2015: 109–110). 5 For a recent confessional articulation of the ex nihilo doctrine which, far from ruling meinongianism out of court, actually seems to contain meinongian hints, cf., The Catechism of the Catholic Church: “We believe that God needs no pre-existent thing [nulla re praeexsistenti] or any help in order to create, nor is creation any sort of necessary emanation from the divine substance” (#296, 1997: 78). The items which do not factor into creation are deliberately specified as being “preexistent”; no mention is made of nonexisting things. 6 Surprisingly, Craig (2014) is so dead set on removing the theological threat of abstract objects that he follows Azzouni’s nominalist strategy, and does for numbers and other abstract objects what we have already seen Azzouni do for fictional objects—namely, just dismiss them by saying that even though it seems we can talk about them and think about them, we don’t.

Notes 7

169

An earlier version of the model that presents abstract objects as existing independently and separately from God can be found in (Davison 1991). Also Wolterstorff (1970: 291–297) makes a claim analogous to van Inwagen’s, to the effect that Biblical sources should not be understood as making claims about the ontological dependence on God of things like abstract objects, like numbers, etc.

8

This isn’t the only problem with absolute creationism. Another notorious one, which I will not pursue here, is that if God created all natures and properties, did God create the divine nature, with whatever property/properties actually characterize it?

9

Cf. (Davison 1991: 495): “It seems that [Morris and Menzel’s] account of the creation of abstract objects involves something like the neo-platonic notion of emanation, rather than the traditional theistic notion of creation (which is typically viewed as free in the strong sense that God could have created different things or nothing at all).”

10 Cf. (Augustine, Eighty-Three Different Questions, 46.2.21–32, trans. David L. Mosher 1982: 79–81). 11 Cf., Aquinas, Summa theol. 1.15; Sum. cont. gent. 1.51–54. 12 Aquinas states that the ideas are plural (Summa theol. 1.15.2) in the sense that the divine essence can be participated in many ways. In themselves, however, all the divine ideas are identical with the divine essence (Summa theol. 1.15.1, ad. 2 and ad.3; 1.15.2 ad. 1) and so are identical to each other. 13 Aquinas himself, in de Ver. 23.4 ad. 3, admits (in a rare concession to an objection) that for God to create some things and not others, he must direct his will differently toward those items in the divine mind that he wishes to make actual, as opposed to those ideas God does not wish to actualize, but can actualize. The passage suggests that to make sense of creation, Aquinas is forced to acknowledge some internal distinction among the divine ideas. 14 Brian Leftow (2012: 309) acknowledges that “an idea worth exploring” is to make some kind of non-platonist analogy between how we know fictional objects and God’s “pre-creative concepts.” He mentions the idea only in passing, however, probably due to what seems (earlier on the same page) to be his pessimism about the prospects of meinongian possibilism. 15 As I have already made clear, I do not think any nonexistents are contradictory objects. If they were, of course, there would be a renewed danger of slipping into universal possibilism: why could God not make round squares as easily as angular squares if both, before creation, have the same ontological status?

170

Notes

Chapter 7 1

Among Patristic commentaries that see the text as metaphysically charged, cf. (St. Hilary, de Trin. 1.5); (St. Gregory Nazianzus, Orat. 45.3); (St. Augustine, Ennar. in Psalm. 134.4); (St. John Damascene, de Fide Orth. 1.9); (St. Bernard, de Consid. 5.6). Cf. (De Vogel 1961).

2

Boethius, de Trinitate, 2.

3

Cf. (Mojsisch, trans. Orin F. Summerell 2001: 52).

4

A philospher like Anthony Kenny, who is committed to the Russell/Frege characterization of “existence” as a second-order predicate, will naturally think that the identification of God and being is a grammatical incoherence that fails to signify. Cf., Kenny (2002: 195–204). But since on the meinongian model “existence” is a first-order predicate, it is more plausible to suppose that the affirmation “God is being” expresses meaningful content.

5

For further commentary on how Aquinas presents participation as an effect’s imitation of its cause, cf. (Wippel 2000: 117ff.). Caponi (2003: 385), commenting on the same theme of causal imitation in Aquinas, says “Thus divinity proceeds into creatures and is multiplied in them in the sense of caused likeness, not in a pantheistic parceling out of existence.”

6

Te Velde’s interpretation of Aquinas provides a pithy rejection of panentheism: “Although one can perfectly well say that God and creatures have in common that they both are, this does not mean that they both have being in common” (1995: 191).

7

“causa prima regit omnes res, praeterquam commisceatur eis.”

8

“no magis dicetur vere lapis est ens quam lapis est Deus.”

9

For a more detailed look at panentheism and the ontological argument, cf. (Whittenmore 1971).

10 Cf., Parmenides: “Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but everything is full of what is” (Burnet’s translation, as cited in Parmenides, Fragments, 8.22–24, trans. David Gallop 1984: 69). 11 John Macquarie (1984: 54) identifies the term “panentheism” with dialectical theism, which he defines as the view according to which the being of God “is both transcendent and immanent, both impassible and passable, both temporal and eternal, and so on with the other divine attributes.” Also, much of the literature makes a definite link between the panentheistic position and the conviction that God is able to suffer out of love for His creatures (cf., Donceel

Notes

171

1971). But if, as I argue, panentheism is consistent with the idea that creatures do not causally affect God, then clearly divine passibility is not in any sense entailed by panentheism. 12 It seems legitimate to talk about non-necessary aspects of God, in that God might have chosen not to create, in which case He would have known that nothing but Himself existed. In which case His knowledge is other than it might have been. If we want to call such aspects of divinity contingent we may, but it is not a contingency on creatures—creatures are effects, not causes, of the nonnecessary determination of God’s will and knowledge (cf., Hartshorne [1941] 1964: 242). 13 For a list of authors who criticize the identification of God and his properties, cf. (Dolezal 2011: 11–29).

Chapter 8 1 Libertarians are divided over whether free choices are uncaused, or nondeterministically caused. As the next chapter should show, it seems to me that free sins are non-deterministically uncaused and that free good choices are nondeterministically caused. 2 Even if we allow that God exists outside of time, and possesses knowledge of all truth in a single moment of apprehension, once we say that God’s knowledge of free creaturely decisions is caused by those free decisions, we are bound to say that God chooses the initial conditions of the universe, and chooses to make free creatures in the first place, without the benefit of the knowledge of what those free creatures are going to do. Otherwise we become embroiled in causal circularity: God’s knowledge of free creaturely choices causally depends on free creaturely choices; free created choices causally depend on the existence of free creatures; the existence of free creatures causally depends on God’s decision to make creatures; God’s decision to make creatures depends on God’s knowledge of free creaturely choices. 3 Cf., Matthew 26:32. One might say that Peter’s case is not an illustration of prophesied free choice, since his denials of Christ were causally determined by Peter’s character. If this is so, then it is strange that the Gospel narrative so emphasizes Peter’s repentance for precisely his denials, and not for whatever behavior led up to his character being so malformed that he was unable to resist denying Christ.

172

Notes

4

This use of “feasible” follows the use of (Flint 1998: 51).

5

Put more precisely, God chooses which world to “weakly actualize,” that is, causally determine all the elements of the world which God can causally determine (free choices being, on a libertarian view, a clear exception). Cf. (Plantinga 1974a: 172–173).

6

It is not the case that an infeasible possible scenario corresponds to every feasible possible scenario, since some feasible scenarios do not include creatures with free will—in such cases it makes no sense to talk about otherwise identical situations wherein free creatures choose differently.

7

Merricks, remarkably, as it seems to me, seems to think this position is significantly different from saying that true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true, because they just are true. Hasker (2011: 29) says that to offer this “clarification” of what grounds the truth of true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom is like a taunting, insulting gesture.

8

(Merricks 2007: 151), citing (Adams 1987: 80), citing Francisco Suarez, discusses so-called suarezian properties, which are properties of the agent described by true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. Because Merricks tacitly assumes that only existing things can have properties, and because counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are not about existing situations or even (in many cases) existing people, he concludes that counterfactuals cannot be about an agent having suarezian properties. But if a nonexistent can have properties, which is the basic position of meinongianism, then there is no reason why a nonexisting thing should lack a property regarding what it would do if it were real and placed in certain real circumstances.

9

The example of Curley Smith comes from Plantinga (1974a: 173–174).

10 Cf. (Flint 1999: 303) who acknowledges that we have “counterfactual control” over God’s knowledge of the true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, but this does not mean causal control; it means rather the causally neutral control such that if we had acted differently the other facts in question would have been different. It is not a control that impacts those facts in any way.

Chapter 9 1 “ex hoc ipso quod cognoscitur aliquid, cognoscitur eius privatio et eius contrarium… unde, cum malum sit privatio boni, oportet quod ex hoc ipso quod scit quodlibet bonum et mensuramm cuiuscumque, quod cognoscat quodlibet malum.”

Notes

173

2 I realize negative causation is a hot topic right now, but I’m just going to presume that a lack of something can explain another lack of something (Why isn’t there any food on the table? Because there wasn’t any in the cupboard), but it can’t be a cause in the sense of making something exist. 3 Maritain uses, in addition to “refusal,” the more metaphysically loaded verb “nihilate” and phrases “initiative of nothingness” and “fissure of being” (cf., Maritain, trans. Joseph W. Evans 1966: 11). 4 What I mean here by “metaphysically sufficient” grace should not be confused with what is called simply “sufficient grace.” The latter expression usually means a grace that allows the free creature the power to do the right thing, but does not by itself allow the creature to exercise its power. Cf. (Garrigou-LaGrange, trans. Bede Rose [1939] 1998: 179). The latter notion is rich and highly controversial, but I don’t think there’s any need to address it here. 5 Different authors who basically subscribe to CRA use varying terms for this nihilating initiative. We can use the various terms synonymously, whether “nihilation,” “nullification” (cf., Journet, trans. Michael Barry 1963: 178–179), “refusal” (cf., Burrell 1993: 95–128), “resistance” (cf., Most 1997) or “failure” (cf., Pontifex 1960). 6 For the classic analysis of “excuse,” cf. (Austin [1956] 1990).

Conclusion 1 I have already noted the way “not something” can be idiomatically used to refer to verbal constructions—like contradictions—which themselves fail to refer at all. Thus, “A round square is not something” is, I think, an idiom for asserting that “a round square” does not refer. But clearly in the case we are considering, we are interested in Catherine herself, and not whether the term “Catherine” or “you” refers in real or counterfactual situations.

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Index

aboutness, 42–3 absolute necessity, 85–6, 110 abstract objects, 62, 169 n.7 creation of, 100–6 debates about, 61 analogy, 117, 149–50 with free will, 132–3 anti-meinongians, 82 anti-molinism, 130 anti-molinists, 138 apophaticism, 113–14 Aquinas, Thomas, 33–9 Aristotle, 34, 35, 95, 98, 111 attribute of perfection, 79 Azzouni, Jody, 7, 23–5 badness, 142 causal circularity, 136–40 causal contingency, 71 causal history, 50 causality, 64–5 issue of, 49 causal offerings of God, 147 causal power, 152 causal relationships, 62 causation counterfactual analysis of, 62–3 general characterization of, 65 and nonexistence, 64 Christian compatibilism, 126, 145–6 Christian determinism, 145 Christian libertarians, 126 Christian platonism, 89 Christian tradition, 126–7 circularity causal, 136–40 terms of, 129 common sense, 53–6 scandals for, 162 n.20

conceptual elements, 101 conditional de dicto necessity, 85 conditional necessity, 85 congenital analgesia, 144 content-oriented fiction, 21 contingency, 59–61 fictional object nominalism and, 66–70 fictional object realism and, 70–5 idea of necessarily, 61–5 notion of, 61 contradictions, 165 n.7 contradictory objects, 47 counterfactual analysis of causation, 62–3 CRA. See Creaturely Resistance Account (CRA) creation, 44, 94–100 diversity in, 99 explanation for, 95 meinongian description of, 100 creationism, 169 n.8 Creaturely Resistance Account (CRA), 146, 148, 153 proponents of, 152 creatures, 1, 96, 99, 154 existence of, 111 god vs., 1 nature of, 151 resistance of, 153 critics, 116–17 decision making, 102 de dicto contradiction, 48 de dicto necessity, 85 de re aspect of conditional necessity, 86 dialetheism, 47 discrepancy, 149 distinctive property, 84 diversification of reality, 96 divine causality, 148, 151 divine nature, uniqueness of, 106

Index divine omnipotence, 153 Divine Withholding Account (DWA), 145. See Divine Withholding Account (DWA) durability, 84 emanation, 169 n.9 emanationism, 94 empty names, 20 essential features, 67 evil cause of, 145 knowledge of, 142 as nonexistence, 141 freely chosen, 143–55 knowing, 142–3 privation theory, 142 primary form of, 155 exemplification, 63 property, 90 existence, 75, 107–9, 113 characterization of, 170 n.4 definition of, 107 discontinuity of, 134 of finite things, 59 as god, 109–10 identity with, 112 of natural thing, 59 nature of, 108–9 of objects, 63 panentheism, 111–18 perfection and, 77, 78–84 property, 118–20 of things, 112 existential generosity, 151 existing objects of awareness, 54 existing things, 138 awareness of, 52 character of, 45–6 and fictional things, 33 ex nihilo, 93–4 confessional articulation of, 168 n.5 creation of abstract objects, 100–6 doctrine of, 97 nonexistent otherness and creation, 94–100 sources for, 97 tradition of creation, 152–3

183

experience, language and, 23–4 extrinsic causal predetermination, 137 feasible disposition, 142 fictional characters, 161 n.17 fictional discourse, 53 Walton’s characterization of, 20 fictional evils, 141 fictional imagining, 21 fictional individuals, 17 fictionalist/nominalist strategy, 101 fictional names, 22–3 fictional nominalism, 55 fictional object, 165 n.9 fictional objects, 16, 17, 23–5, 28–30, 44–5, 65, 121, 131, 132, 141, 154, 160 n.1, 162 n.21 approach to, 11 Aquinas’s theory of, 164 n.18 attitude towards, 7 critique of, 27 existence of, 69 fundamental intuitions about, 42–3 as ideas, 33–9 kinds of, 33 nominalism, 23 nonexistence of, 27 properties, 69 realm of, 106 real vs., 49, 134 in thomistic corpus, 33 true characterization of, 54 understanding of, 38 fictional objects realism, 23, 27–8 Aquinas and fictional objects as ideas, 33–9 David Lewis and modal realism, 31–3 van Inwagen and object theory, 28–31 fictional phrases, 8–9 fictional realism, 55 fictional talk, 19–20 fictional things. See also fictional objects existing things and, 33 knowledge of, 36 formal semantics, 55 free choice, 126, 136, 137, 171 n.3 knowledge of, 126 nonexistence of, 131 variables of, 126

184 free decisions, 128, 129 free will, 151 analogy with, 132–3 futurabilia, 127, 130–1 truths of, 129 game-related behaviors, 19–20 generality, scale of, 67 genuine nonexistents, 125 god bottom-up approach to, 114 creative activity, 125 vs. creatures, 1 debates about, 61 knowledge of nonexistents, 125 and nonexistents, 120–1 non-meinongian option for dealing with, 104 scholastic characterization of, 105 traditional attributes, 94 good–evil dualism, 141 goodness, 119 granted existence, 81 human free choices, knowledge of, 126 identification, criteria for, 51–2 imagination, 12 immaterial object, 28 immensity, 93 imperfection, 109 inconsistencies, occurrence of, 35 independent thinkers, 84 individual things, level of, 14 inferior fictional discourse, 20 intellectual attentiveness, 150 intentional attitudes, 7 intentionalism, 41 invention, 44 island-perfect, 82 knowledge, 143 of human free choices, 126 of nonexistents, 133 objects for, 139 paradigmatic case of, 129 of possibilities, 129 Kondoleon, Theodore J., 133

Index language of being, 12–13 of existence, 12–13 and experience, 23–4 Lewis, David, 31–3 libertarian free choices, 137 libertarianism, 133 libertarian theism, 125–7 linguistic elements, 101 linguistic practice, 2 consensus of, 64 linguistic regulations, network of, 12 literary characters, 18–19 material/immaterial distinction, 39 meinongianism, 2–4, 23, 41–2, 77, 82, 83, 88, 97, 98, 105–8, 135, 136, 154–5, 167 n.3 advantages of, 96 benefits of, 42–4 commitments, 84 and common sense, 53–6 knowledge of fictional things, 50–3 and molinism, 129 nonexistent objects of, 134 objection to, 46 perspective of, 128–9 separated only by existence, 44–50 meinongian knowledge, 143 meinongian model, 79 meinongian molinism, 138 meinongian principles, 3 meinongian reflection, 3 meinongian system, 54 meinongian theism, 3–4, 141 metaphysical consistency, 143 metaphysical implications, 68 metaphysical theism, 1 middle knowledge, 125–8, 138 causal circularity, 136–40 nonexisting subject matter of, 130–6 modal disposition, 142 modal realism, 31–3 molinism, 114, 127, 128–9, 135 benefits of, 128 historical objections to, 138 meinongianism and, 129 model, criticisms against, 130

Index objections to, 128–9 objection to, 134 moral privations, 144 motivation, 149 mystical theology, 119 names, theory of, 8 natural evils, 141, 144 natural things, 60 cause of, 66 nonexistence of, 66 nature, aristotelian model of, 106 nature necessity, 87–8 necessary existence discussions of, 87 necessity absolute, 85 categories of, 85 conditional, 85 presentation of, 87 view of, 85 negation, 148 negative existentials, 19, 72 nihilation, 147, 148 nomenclature, 41 nominalism, 2, 7, 66, 67 nominalist position, 66 nominalist strategy, 168 n.6 non-being, images of, 153 noneism, 41 non-essential features, 68 nonexistence, 43, 75, 93–4 causation and, 64 creation, 94–100 fictional object nominalism and, 66–70 fictional object realism and, 70–5 of free choices, 131, 133 idea of necessarily, 61–5 indeterminacy and, 132 issue of, 62 notion of, 61 objects, 41 otherness, 94–100 parts, 120 properties of, 142 scenarios, 130 suffering as form of, 143

185

theory of, 2 zone of, 100 nonexistents, 107–9, 125–8, 160 n.2 characterization of, 74 genuine, 125 god and, 120–1 horde of, 120 knowledge of, 133 objections to molinism, 128–9 possibility of, 66–7 things, 130 nonexisting objects, 50 nonexisting property, definition of, 108 nonexisting things, 9, 49, 138–9 admission of, 60 awareness of, 52 nonmoral evil, 144 nonmoral privations, 144 normality, 42–3 normative disposition, 142 nothing definition of, 152 existing, 97 nothingness, 108 notion of contingency, 61 objection, primary motivation of, 152 object theory, 28–31 merits of, 29 one-sided relations, 99 ontological arguments, 77, 82, 83, 87, 89 oracular mysticism, 113–14 orthodox monotheism, 141 otherness, 94–100 pain, 144 panentheism, 111–18, 170 n.6 primary opposition to, 111 “shared existence” model of, 112 panentheistic analogy, 116 pantheism, 94, 114 parmenides, 108 perfection, 80, 109, 113, 166 n.1 attribution of, 79 and divine existence, 77–90 and existence, 77–84 personal maturity, 144 philosophers, 24–5

186 philosophical discomfort, 101–2 platonic model of properties, 107 platonism, 134 abstract objects of, 134 possible worlds, 32, 87 structures of, 88 pre-existent thing, 97 pretense-theoretical approach, 16–23 pretense theory, 69 critique of, 22 privation, 144–5, 147 theory, 142 property, 110, 118–20 aristotelian model of, 106 of being, 29 conjuction of, 30 exemplification, 90 nominalist description of, 119 possession of, 73–4 subject of, 45 prop-oriented fiction, 21 propositional functions, 8, 9, 12 level of, 10, 13–14 radical autonomy, 146 radical disparity, 74 radical nominalism, 23–5, 70 rational codification, 83 real free choices, 129 realism, 2 real things, determinateness of, 45 real-world happenings, 21 Russell, Betrand, 7, 14, 15–16 scope necessity, 87–8 self-actualization, 105 self-expression, 94, 114 self-sufficiency, 61 sensory suffering, 144 “shared existence” model of panentheism, 112 simpliciter, 81 sins, 145

Index description of, 150 Divine Withholding Account (DWA) of, 145 phenomenon of, 155 Sokolowski, Robert, 60 sovereignty, 93, 102 spatial extension, zones of, 112 spatial metaphor, 111 spatio-temporal things, 72–3 suffering, 143–4 kinds of, 144 syllogism, 22, 79, 84, 96 theism, 3 theological writing, 1 theology, 2 analysis of, 141 theory components of, 29 of names, 11 tradition, 1 traditional theism, 66–7, 144 traditional theistic belief, 2 uncritical formulations of, 2 traditional theological language, 146 translated existential statements, 14 translation, 15 truth, 43 about fictional objects, 53–4 definition of, 52 unique cultural history, 21 universal causality, 61 universal possibilism, 102–3 van Inwagen, Peter, 28–31 van Inwagen, Peter, 12–13 verbal communication component of, 21 Walton, Kendall, 7, 16–23 Williams, Donald C., 12