Download or read book Much Ado About Nonexistence written by Avrum Stroll and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2007-04-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The problem of the nature of fiction and the problem of nonexistence are closely tied because fiction often talks about nonexistent entities. In Fiction, Reference, and Nonexistence, A. P. Martinich and Avrum Stroll, two of America's leading philosophers, explore fiction and undertake an analytic philosophical study of fiction and its reference and its relation to truth. Included in the discussion is the authors' new, contemporary theory of fiction developed as an extension of the speech act theory of H. P. Grice, as well as the relationship between nonexistence and Bertrand Russell's well-known theory of definite descriptions, and Hilary Putnam's theory of the relationship between common names and the world.