Fiction and Non-Existence


Course Number	Phil 845.001 (spring 2025)
Title	Research Seminar in Philosophy of Language
Credit Hours	3 credits
Course Description	See below
Prerequisites	None
Target Audience	Philosophy graduate students and others with comparable preparation and instructor’s permission
Class Times and Location	Wed 1:00–3:30 pm in Caldwell 213
Instructional Format	In-person, mix of structured presentation and group discussion
Instructors	Professor Jim Pryor (he/him, email jimpryor@unc.edu)
Teaching Assistants	None
Course Website	https://www.jimpryor.net/teaching/courses/phil845
Instructors’ Office Hours	See below
Course Texts	Readings provided by web links

Zoom links for any course meetings you need to attend remotely, and for Professor Pryor’s office hours can be retrieved from this restricted page.

Course Description

The seminar will explore metaphysical issues about fictions and illusions, and semantic issues about “empty” names and negative existential statements (“there are no unicorns,” “Sherlock Holmes never existed”). Questions we consider will include: How to understand statements made in a work of fiction: are all or any of them true? false? neither? What about claims “from the outside” about fictional characters or places or events, such as “Holmes lived into his seventies”? Do any such fictional entities exist? If so in what sense? How can we make sense of their not existing? How can we manage to think and talk in persisting and coordinated ways about the same fictional entities? Are answers to these questions dependent on a story’s being intentionally created (or treated) as fiction, and our contingent social institutions? What might be different when it comes to illusions that have no authors, and whose audiences may not recognize them as such?

Target Audience

The intended audience for this seminar are philosophy graduate students, no matter their specific backgrounds and interests. It’s not meant only for those who have or want to focus on metaphysics and philosophy of language. That said, the literature on some of these topics can become more technical. I’ll do all I can to make the issues and discussion as accessible to as many participants as possible.

Students who aren’t philosophy grads should discuss their preparation with the instructors and need their permission to enroll.

Instructor

The course is offered by Professor Jim Pryor (he/him). Grad students generally address me as “Jim.”

Professor Pryor’s office is Caldwell 108A. He can best be reached by email, at jimpryor@unc.edu.

Professor Pryor’s office hours are on Mondays from 3:30–4:30 and Fridays from 12:45–1:45. (If you have a quick question, you can also ask just after class.) If you’re unable to meet in person or at these times, we can also arrange to meet by Zoom. The Zoom link for office hours can be found on this restricted page.

Feel free to drop into office hours to discuss anything you like about our course. I’m happy to talk about paper ideas, continue discussion, and so on. If you do come to my office and I’m already speaking with someone, make sure that we know that you’re waiting for us to finish.

Course Requirements and Expectations

The University advises you that a 3 credit course should be expected to demand 9–12 hours of work per week on average, including the time for classroom meetings. For our course, that means in a standard week (when no assignment is due) you should still expect to be devoting about 7 hours to this course outside of our in-class meetings. This includes reading (and re-reading, analyzing, and taking notes on) the assigned texts, reviewing any presentation notes, coming to our office hours, discussing the issues with other students, and so on. When you’re working on papers, you should expect to need more time.

It is essential that you attend the class meetings regularly. Material not in the readings will often be presented there, and useful background and framing for many of the readings will also be provided.

The University’s Class Attendance Policy can be found here. In brief, they authorize absences only for some University activities, religious observances, disabilities, significant health conditions including pregnancy, and personal or family emergencies. If these include your situation, then consult these links:

The University Approved Absence Office (UAAO) provides information and FAQs for students related to University Approved Absences.
Students can be excused because of disability, pregnancy, or religious observance, as required by law and approved by Accessibility Resources and Service (ARS) and/or the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office (EOC).
Students can be excused for significant health conditions (generally, these will require you to miss classes for five or more days) and/or personal/family emergencies, as approved by the Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS), Gender Violence Service Coordinators, and/or the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office (EOC).

If you need to miss class because of a more temporary illness, just email to let us know. If you need to miss class for other kinds of reasons (like a job interview or to attend your mother’s wedding), ask us about it well in advance. Given the course format, and since we only meet once a week, there isn’t much room for absences. If you do miss a class, you will be responsible for catching up with missed content; and permission to miss a class doesn’t excuse you from deadlines for work due before or after the class.

If you need to stay home during any of our class meetings, try to attend the meeting by Zoom instead.

We won’t prohibit the use of laptops or tablets for taking notes, though we strongly discourage this. We’ll post summaries of the main outlines of our presentations, so you won’t need to write everything down during our meetings. You should be reviewing those presentation notes outside of class anyway. An effective use of your time in the classroom is to focus on following our presentations and any class discussion, and actively raising questions when you don’t. If you must have a device open in class, don’t browse the web, or read/send texts or other social media during our meetings. It’s pretty clear to everyone when you are doing this, and it’s rude and distracting to your instructors and your classmates.

When you join our class meetings, you are expected to have read any material assigned for that day, and to be ready to discuss it and/or ask questions about it.

It is essential that you ask questions when things in the readings or our presentations or our group discussion are unclear, and be ready to participate when we have class discussions. We’ll expect you to actively engage with each other in class, and encourage you also to actively engage with each other outside the classroom, for example in study groups or to work together on homeworks. Talking about philosophy is one of the best ways of learning how to do it. Your overall participation will contribute substantially to your grade for the course. See this page on participation for more details. (This course won’t have separate “discussion sections” as that page assumes; we’ll integrate discussion into the main meetings.) If you don’t plan to participate earnestly, you should not take this course.

There will be reading assignments for most class meetings. These readings tend not to be long, but they all require close study. You should read them carefully before we discuss them in class, and you’ll need to read them more than once. For most of the readings, you won’t understand the material sufficiently with just a single reading. A good strategy would be to read the assignment once before we discuss it, and then go back and read it again after we’ve discussed it. If you don’t plan to do this, you should not take this course. We’ll often post summaries of material we presented in class. You should read these materials carefully and expect that you’ll have to read many of them more than once, too.

Here is a detailed explanation of how you’ll be expected to read philosophy papers.

Students taking the class for credit will write two papers during the semester, one in the middle of term and one at the end. The first paper should be around 3000 words. The second can be a new paper of the same size, or a substantial development and refinement of the first paper.

Philosophy grads who choose to take the seminar in “Reduced Writing” mode will be expected to prepare all of the readings, participate fully when we have group discussion. They won’t have to write papers.

{#honorcode} The **[University Honor Code](http://catalog.unc.edu/policies-procedures/honor-code/)** applies to all course assignments, exams, and petitions for absences or rescheduling. In brief, this means students are expected to refrain from "lying, cheating, or stealing" in the academic context. For more information or to clarify which actions violate the honor code, consult with your instructors, [studentconduct.unc.edu](https://studentconduct.unc.edu/), and/or [The Instrument of Student Judicial Governance](https://studentconduct.unc.edu/about-us/forms-documents/instrument/).

What constitutes “lying, cheating, or stealing” depends on the academic activity.

During exams, you won’t be allowed to collaborate, or consult anything but the notes and resources we specify.
In this course, you’re allowed (indeed encouraged!) to study together and work together on your homeworks. But you should write up your solutions yourself (don’t have the whole group copy and paste the same text), and it must represent your own understanding of the exercise and its solution. If you submit solutions you don’t fully understand, it will be easy for us to recognize this (whether from the homework, or from interactions with you in and out of the classroom), and it’ll be worse for you than if you tried to solve at least part of the exercise in ways you do understand, and explained how/why you got stuck.
A general rule is that you can’t resubmit your own work for different courses (whether taken the same semester or not). Work you turn in for different courses must be substantially different.
In this course, you are allowed (indeed encouraged!) to get feedback from your peers on any essay you write before submitting it. You can also make use of UNC’s Writing Center and/or Learning Center (see description and links later). But in all cases, the work you submit must represent your own developed thoughts and expression, and you must give appropriate credit for ways that others influenced the essay.

Calendar

Bibliography

Here is a list of major texts on our topics. We’ll be reading selections from some of these during the semester, but won’t be able to work through all of them. You may want to read further on your own. We’ll also be reading from some supplementary literature. As the seminar progresses, I’ll assign specific readings to specific dates. I’m sorry that I’m not yet in a position to do that for more than the first weeks. To some extent, I am also exploring this literature myself.

Syllabus Updates

The instructor reserves the right to make changes to the syllabus, including assignment due dates. These changes will be announced as early as possible so that students can adjust their schedules.

Feedback

I welcome your input about the course at any time. You are welcome to approach me directly. I’ll also provide opportunities for anonymous evaluation and feedback during the term.

Phil 845: Fiction and Non-Existence

Overview

Canvas Site, Zoom, and Regular Updates