The so-called paradox of fiction and transcendental ontology

Abstract

While the phenomenon of our feeling of empathy for literary characters has escorted the history of imaginative writing from the very beginning, its ontological foundations have been investigated only from 1970s. The question is about different theories of “the paradox of fiction” which was introduced by Colin Redford. The basic idea behind the paradox is that empathy for the nonexistent characters of fiction and their interrela­tions as real is paradoxical and so demands explanation. Having presented the main doc­trines related to the subject matter, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a paradox in this case. What there is is a single-level reductionist naturalistic worldview which comes into collision with both the phenomenology of the relevant feeling of empathy and the definitions of existence offered by the history of European philosophy as well as their reliable counterparts outside it. According to these definitions, to exist is to be perceptible and have causality, the latter “index” being em­phasized in the article to the result that the activity of literary characters provides them with a higher ontological status compared to some other classes of mental objects. All this justifies the author in advancing the conception of heterogeneity of existence and his attempts to use quantifiers in relation to it.