Publication Date
2005
Faculty Department
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Creationism is the view that fictional individuals such as Sherlock Holmes are contingently existing abstracta that come about due to the intentional activities of authors. Author-essentialism is the stronger thesis that the author responsible for bringing a fictional individual into existence at a time is essential to the existence of that individual. Takashi Yagisawa has recently attacked this view on the following grounds: author-essentialists rely on an ontological parallelism between fictional individuals and whole works of fiction, but this parallelism fails to obtain. I here argue that Yagisawa’s grounds are weak.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
“Defending Author-Essentialism,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2005)
