This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy Bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
Tim Crane exists.
That's one of his many admirable characteristics.
He's the Knightbridge professor of philosophy at Cambridge.
But suppose Tim Crane did not exist.
Suppose he were a fictional character in a philosophical novel.
And suppose I then claimed that Tim Crane was the Knightbridge professor of philosophy at Cambridge.
How could I talk about somebody, refer to somebody who didn't exist?
Tim Crane, welcome to philosophy bites.
Thank you, Nigel.
The topic we're going to focus on today is non existence.
Could you just begin by explaining why that would be a problem?
The problem is that we can think and talk about things that don't exist.
It's very natural to treat thought or language or a representation of the world in terms of a relation between the thinker and the thing thought about, or between a word and the thing represented by the word.
Now, on the whole, relations imply that the things related exist.
If you take, for example, a spatial relation, the relationship between London and Edinburgh, you can ask, well, what is that relation?
What is the distance between London and Edinburgh?