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The medieval analysis of artistic creation has given way to different solutions: on one hand a strongly affirmed mistrust for the poetical written word (fabula), on the other a complete acceptance of the pictorial, sculptorial or mosaic image. Long before the beginning of the struggle against iconoclasty, for which various reasons of social and political order have been found, it is possible to recognise the proof of a philosophical origin of such an attitude. Some passages from Plotinus' Enneads define the artistic image as the direct connection to the Nous, thus being a clear invitation to represent objects in such a way as to underline their "form", therefore avoiding all shadows and perspective issues. The result is an artistic program which has many similarities and correspondences with the Christian art of painting and sculpting of the first centuries, that clearly did not receive these aesthetical indications directly from Plotinus, but rather from the Fathers of the Church, who resumed many neo-platonical issues. Agostinus from Ippona, in a not very well known passage, states that the written text, once seen, requires a competent interpreter, whereas painting is of immediate comprehension. The written text therefore creates a further gap between its truth and the reader, while images, and in a certain sense also theatrical and mimic representations, have a ratio bifrons, as stated in the Soliloquia, in the sense that they are at the same time true and false: false because they are similar to the true and true because they are false.

Focusing on The PowerBook and The Stone Gods, this article explores the ways in which Jeanette Winterson articulates the interconnections between consciousness and memory, delineates their role in identity formation and reveals how posthuman subjects' practices of embodiment work to undermine both heteronormative and anthropocentric worldviews. The technologically inscribed bodies of the characters portrayed in these two novels, together with Winterson's rhizomatic conceptualization of space and her vertical figuration of time, allow for the time-travelling endeavours of e-storyteller Ali/x and of Robo-sapiens-cum-Robo-head Spike. Such fictional entities prompt investigations into the essence of social-material encounters, of subject-object interdependence, of matter-energy vitality, of interaction and intra-action, of reflexive thought and of self-configuration.

This book tries to explore, in language as non-technical as possible, the deepest philosophical problems regarding the logical status of empty (singular) terms such as `Pegasus', `Batman', `The impossible staircase departs in Escher's painting `Ascending-Descending'+ etc., and regarding sentences which deny the existence of singled-out fictional entities. It will be fascinating for literary theorists with a flair for logic, to students of metaphysics and philosophy of language, and for historians of philosophy interested in the fate of the Russell-Meinong debate. For teachers of these aspects of analytic philosophy this will provide a textbook which goes beyond the Western tradition (without plunging into any mystical Eastern `Emptiness', which is what some previous comparative philosophers did!)

AbstractThis paper presents an artifactual approach to models that also addresses their fictional features. It discusses first the imaginary accounts of models and fiction that set model descriptions apart from imagined-objects, concentrating on the latter (e.g., Frigg in Synthese 172(2):251–268, 2010; Frigg and Nguyen in The Monist 99(3):225–242, 2016; Godfrey-Smith in Biol Philos 21(5):725–740, 2006; Philos Stud 143(1):101–116, 2009). While the imaginary approaches accommodate surrogative reasoning as an important characteristic of scientific modeling, they simultaneously raise difficult questions concerning how the imagined entities are related to actual representational tools, and coordinated among different scientists, and with real-world phenomena. The artifactual account focuses, in contrast, on the culturally established external representational tools that enable, embody, and extend scientific imagination and reasoning. While there are commonalities between models and fictions, it is argued that the focus should be on the fictional uses of models rather than considering models as fictions.

Abstract
This paper aims to propose a third generation semiotic method for analyzing inter-linguistic translations. The paper concentrates on translation issues related to the literary genres related to "genre" literature such as science fiction or fantasy, aiming to provide a semiotic method with which to interpret the texts as holistic entities and to isolate the specific elements that create the textual world. The translation method is based on semiotic tools and theories by Lotman, Eco and Tarasti among others, and is built around the basis of an earlier model by the same author (Loponen, 2006). To help isolate and interpret textual elements that create the genre specific texts as holistic entities, the paper introduces the concept of irrealia into semiotic translation studies.

In order to investigate the conceptualisation of dreams in adults with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities, the paradigm introduced by Woolley & Wellman (1992) was employed in addition to a number of open‐ended questions. Fifty‐four people participated in the study and it was found that 40% of their replies in answer to questions regarding the non‐physical, private nature of dreams were incorrect and that less than a third of the sample (N= 16) were confident that individuals cannot share the same dream. Furthermore, a large proportion of the sample did not consider it possible to dream about fictional entities. The results are discussed in the context of the benefits and barriers for therapists who wish to incorporate clients' reported dreams and nightmares into their therapeutic interactions.

AbstractWhat are scientific models? Philosophers of science have been trying to answer this question during the last three decades by putting forward a number of different proposals. Some say that models are best understood as abstract Platonic objects or fictional entities akin to Sherlock Holmes, while others focus on their mathematical nature and see them as set theoretical structures. Although each account has its own strengths in offering various insights on the nature of models, several objections have been raised against these views which still remain unanswered, making the debate on the ontology of models seem unresolvable. The primary aim of this paper is to show that a large part of these difficulties stems from an inappropriate reading of the main question on the ontology of models as a purely metaphysical question. Building on Carnap, it is argued that the question of the ontology of scientific models is either (i) an internal theoretical question within an already accepted linguistic framework or (ii) an external practical question regarding the choice of the most appropriate form of language in order to describe and explain the practice of scientific modelling. The main implication of this view is that the question of the ontology of models becomes a means of probing other related questions regarding the overall practice of scientific modelling, such as questions on the capacity of models to provide knowledge and the relation of models with background theories.

Telling fictional stories and engaging with the fictional stories of others is an important and pervasive part of human culture. But people not only tell and engage with fictional stories. They also reflect on the content of stories, and on the way these are told. Grappling with the many issues such reflection uncovers has long been a concern of professional academics in language departments and other academic programs with a focus on language. Philosophers should be included on this list. The concept of fiction gives rise to a number of intriguing and complex philosophical issues, and the philosophy of fiction has now become an acknowledged part of mainstream philosophy, with a history that goes back at least to the early debates about the role of poets and dramatists found in the works of Aristotle and Plato. The issues in question broadly relate to fiction as a mode of representation—a way of describing individuals and events—that is strikingly different from representation concerned with truth, the latter long a dominant theme in philosophy. Not only is faithfulness to truth in the ordinary sense not a requirement in fiction; fiction may even depart from truth in the things it talks about, which typically include nonexistent individuals and even members of nonexistent kinds (Holmes and hobbits, for example)—see the entry on fictional entities. There are also more indirect reasons for taking fiction seriously as a philosophical topic. The last few decades have seen a surge of interest in interpreting prominent yet (arguably) philosophically problematic areas of enquiry—areas as far apart as mathematics and morality—as involving something akin to fiction, a position known as fictionalism about those areas. On such views, we should not believe the central claims of the area because of their commitment to entities like numbers and objective moral facts; instead we should treat them the way we treat a distinctively fictional claim like "Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective": something we know not to be literally true (after all, there never was a Sherlock Holmes) but accept as true in some derivative or at least nonliteral sense (unlike "Holmes was a plodding policeman", say). The continuing rise of fictionalism presents us with a new reason for treating fiction as a significant philosophical topic, since it is a position that is difficult to motivate independently of an understanding of what is distinctive about fiction (Armour-Garb and Woodbridge 2015). (For more on fictionalism and its ties to fiction, see the entry on fictionalism.) One fundamental question raised by the notion of fiction is a conceptual one: What makes something a work of fiction as opposed to a work of non-fiction? A first attempt at saying what fiction is might portray it as a kind of writing whose product is a written text (a work of fiction) that misrepresents how the world actually is, although not in order to deceive intended readers. This opposes it to non-fiction; even if a work of non-fiction misrepresents the world, it is not intended by its author to be recognized as something that misrepresents the world. It doesn't take much to see that this rough characterization is in fact far too rough. A work of fiction needn't be a written text, but could be a picture (or series of pictures) or a representation in some other medium like film. And the characterization lets in too much: a newspaper article attacking some political position by engaging in the relentless use of irony, say, is not a work of fiction but a work of non-fiction that uses irony. The problem of saying how fiction differs from non-fiction is just one of the hard problems faced by the philosophical study of fiction. Another problem is that of specifying the sense in which a fictional sentence can be true despite misdescribing how matters stand in the world. (A sentence like "Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective", for example, is not true if it is construed as a claim about brilliant detectives our world has known, but counts as true if it is stated as an answer to a quiz question "Who was Sherlock Holmes?" By contrast, "Sherlock Holmes was a plodding policeman" would count as false in this context.) But in what sense can the sentence be true, given that the world does not contain any such person as Sherlock Holmes? One promising thought is that when we hear the sentence as genuinely true we regard it as elliptical for something like "In the Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective". On this suggestion it is the truth of the latter prefixed sentence that provides the sense in which "Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective" counts as true. But even if this is right, what still needs explaining is what it is for such a prefixed sentence to be true. What makes "In the Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective" true (but not "In the Holmes stories, Sherlock Holmes was a plodding policeman"), when there never was such a person as Sherlock Holmes? In addition to the problem of how to understand the notion of truth in a work of fiction, there is also a deep puzzle about the way we respond emotionally to such truths. When we engage with fiction, we often do so at a highly specific emotional level—we may not only be enthralled by elements of the plot but also affected by what befalls particular characters. Thus, we may find ourselves feeling pity for Anna Karenina as we near the end of Tolstoy's novel because we are aware of Anna's suffering. But the claim that we pity Anna Karenina is deeply puzzling: we know there is no Anna Karenina, and that it is only true in Tolstoy's novel that Anna Karenina is suffering, so how can there be genuine pity for Anna? This is the so-called paradox of fiction, one of a batch of puzzles that have been raised in the philosophy of fiction about our engagement with works of fiction. These are by no means the only philosophical questions thrown up by fiction. In fact, the paradox of fiction immediately suggests others. Taken at face value, a statment like "Sherlock Holmes was a brilliant detective" seems at best to be true in a work of fiction rather than true outright. By contrast, a statement like "Many readers pity Anna Karenina" seems to be true outright. (The same goes for other statements relating fictional characters to the real world, for example "Conan Doyle created Holmes", "Frodo doesn't exist", and "Holmes is more famous than any real detective".) This raises the thorny issue of the ontological commitments of talk involving fiction. If it is genuinely true that many readers feel pity for Anna Karenina or that Doyle created Holmes, then presumably there are things—Anna Karenina and Holmes—about whom this is true. But how is the claim that there are such objects consistent with the obvious truth that Holmes and Anna Karenina don't exist? And what could such nonexistent objects be like? We leave detailed commentary on such ontological and metaphysical questions to the entry on fictional entities. The present entry is devoted to the nature of fiction and its "truths", including our emotional engagement with these truths—topics that can be discussed independently of whether one is a realist or an antirealist about fictional entities. Before we begin, it is worth noting that the study of these topics is not the province of philosophers alone. Just what is fiction, for example, is a question that also engages narratologists and historians of fiction (see, e.g., Gallagher 2006, Walsh 2007), although they approach the issue from different academic perspectives, often with somewhat different aims in mind. The present entry focuses mainly on the work of philosophers.

Intro -- ‎Contents -- ‎Foreword (Lesaffer) -- ‎Preliminary Considerations -- ‎1. Editions of Reference Works -- ‎2. Translations -- ‎3. Transliterations -- ‎4. Chronological References -- ‎Acknowledgments -- ‎List of Figures and Maps -- ‎Figures -- ‎Maps -- ‎Introduction -- ‎1. Between Ares and Athena -- ‎2. Between Custom and Convenience: Rules and Pragmatics -- ‎3. Toward International Law in the Ancient World: Practices and Contexts -- ‎4. Inhumane Acts, Human Words: Analyzing the Restrictive Discourse of War -- ‎Part 1. The Concepts -- ‎Chapter 1. Normativity, Hegemony, and Democratic Performance: The Case of Classical Athens -- ‎1. International Normativity, Subordination, and Political Imposition in the Ancient World -- ‎2. Justice, Law, Laws, and Decrees: The Issue of Terminology -- ‎3. Nomothesia: The Act of Legislating -- ‎4. Dramatic Competitions and Athenian Festivals -- ‎5. Justice as Spectacle in Athens: Judicial praxis -- ‎6. The Assembly, the Theater, and the Courts: Performative Activities of Democracy -- ‎Summation: Democracy as Performative Ritual -- ‎Chapter 2. Greek poleis and International Subjectivity -- ‎1. Toward an Archaeology of the Subject: Did Fictional Entities Have a Legal Personality in the Greek World? -- ‎1.1. Subjects as an Object of Study: A Modern Concept -- ‎1.2. Groups and Associations in Athenian Law -- ‎1.3. The polis as State and Its Legal Representations -- ‎2. The Role of the polis in the Conclusion of Treaties during the Peloponnesian War -- ‎2.1. The Classical Greek Treaties -- ‎2.2. Three Examples as Case Studies -- ‎2.2.1. The Treaties of Athens with Rhegium and Leontinoi -- ‎2.2.2. The Quadripartite Treaty of Athens with Argos, Mantineia and Elis -- ‎2.2.3. The Treaties between Sparta and the Achaemenid Empire -- ‎Summation: International Subjectivity in Ruins -- ‎Part 2. The Rules

Summary. This article starts by setting out the argument of L's anté-peuple, a novel published by Sony Labou Tansi in 1983. On that basis, he puts forward the view put forward by the author of the study throughout these pages: the work analysed shows the immutability of the political and social conditions experienced both in the Zaire and in the People's Republic of Congo and also reveals the transformation of its characters. The particularity of L's anté-peuple compared with the other novels of the Labou Tansi is what the body of observations made in this work gives rise to, since it is a fiction that has a more personal tone and, at the same time, is more distant from the aesthetic paradigms prevailing at the time than the other novels of the chosen author. The article is divided into two parts: the first is to show general aspects of the history of the countries mentioned above and then to see how the author reprepares them in his fiction; the second, on the other hand, shows the characters as fictional entities that change with the events of which they form part. Both paragraphs allow the conclusions to be drawn at the end of the text, in which L is presented as a literary production whose aesthetic is complex because of the way in which the aspects of fiction discussed in the analysis interact with each other. ; Resumen Este artículo inicia exponiendo el argumento de L'anté-peuple, novela publicada por Sony Labou Tansi en 1983. Sobre esa base, presenta la tesis que defiende el autor del estudio a lo largo de estas páginas: la obra analizada da cuenta de la inmutabilidad de las condiciones político-sociales vividas tanto en el Zaire como enla República Popular del Congo y también revela la transformación experimentada por sus personajes. La particularidad de L'anté-peuple con respecto al resto de novelas del Labou Tansi es lo que suscita el conjunto de observaciones que se realizan en este trabajo, pues es una ficción que tiene un tono más personal y, al mismo tiempo, más distante de los paradigmas estéticos ...

In his philosophical treatise, Poetics, Aristotle states that the historian significantly differs from the poet because their work describes what has happened, while the other describes the thing that might happen. Therefore the majority of fictional narratives are secluded to the realm outside of traditional historical archives. Although they contain stories and events that may be as real or valid as any of those found in a non-fictional discourse, they remain untold outside of their "fictional frame." However, an analysis of several prominent Egyptian novels, published in the mid 20th century, combine to form a "counter discourse" to the hegemonic narrative of Egypt's socio-economic and political development during this tumultuous period. Together, these novellas emphasize the belief that "narrativity, rather than the presence or absence of documents, is what makes 'historical narrative' meaningful, and therefore effective." Today, many historians and literary theorists are exploring modes of "hybridization that one may arrive at some notion of better ways to undertake research into significant problems in both the humanities and the so-called human sciences." History and literature cannot be classified as homogeneous entities, as "they are fluid, heterogeneous areas where diverse practices and techniques are mixed." Fictional narratives can often be used to enhance knowledge gained from the study of historical archives, as well as provide an alternative understanding of significant historical periods or events.

Abstract
Recent work in environmental philosophy has uncoupled the notion of agency from the human domain, arguing that the efficacy of nonhuman entities and processes can also be construed as a form of "agency." In this paper, we study discursive constructions of nonhuman agency as they appear in a set of interviews revolving around fictional narratives. The participants were asked to read microfiction engaging with the nonhuman perspectives of entities such as a melting glacier or an endangered tree species. The analysis of the interviews centers on "complex" attributions of nonhuman agency – that is, attributions that involve a combination of agencies attributed to the nonhuman. We show that these complex attributions emerge more frequently in discussing the story (what we call the "storytalk") than elsewhere in the interviews. We also explore the way in which such complex constructions of nonhuman agency challenge widespread assumptions about the natural world.

As We Enter a New Century and Millennium, We Tend to View More entities as forged, made up, invented—constructed is the more professional term in scholarship—than we did at any time in the past. Not only poems, paintings and other artifacts, but a whole range of phenomena, from an individual's sense of identity, to categories of knowledge or scientific disciplines, to feelings of belonging to professional, ethnic, or national entities, are thought of not as "natural" or "given" but as imagined, constructed. Languages and cultures themselves are said to be constructs, more or less fictional occurrences set forth as real by the force of massive belief in their "realness." Under such circumstances we might well once again raise the question of how one conceptualizes—or evaluates, to move the matter on to the axiological plane—those epitomes of collective cultural construction, namely culture-specific encyclopedias, works of scholarship that were once thought of, rather naively, simply as "research tools"?

This article examines the connection between early scientific ideas and It-Narratives in Britain over the long eighteenth century. A set of It-Narratives - fictional texts narrated by, or centred on, non-human entities like things or animals - will be read against the attempt to detect the voice of natural things by a number of early-modern experimental and natural philosophers. It will be argued that, although causal links are hard to prove, there is a degree of epistemic vicinity between these early scientific ideas and It-Narratives. In particular, it will be shown how in both disciplines fiction helped contemplate the possibility that non-human knowledge is more reliable than human-derived one.

This article examines the science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica (2003–9) as a complex allegorical exploration of the ways in which Islam is understood and misunderstood in the West. While it never refers directly to Islam, by trading on the metaphoric distance offered by the genre conventions of science fiction, the series radically questions the binary logic of the influential 'clash of civilizations' thesis, which presents 'the West' and 'Islam' as distinct entities at war with one another. With its constantly shifting perspective on two fictional warring civilizations, Battlestar Galactica undermines such simplistic understandings of contemporary religious and political violence. More radically, the series seriously attempts to answer the question posed by a key character representing the West: 'Why are we as a people worth saving?'