I personally subscribe to The Economist. TOE listeners get 35% off the annual subscription. No other podcast has this! https://economist.com/TOE
Does Batman exist? Not really—but proving he doesn’t turns out to be a logical minefield. This episode tackles negative existentials: why saying “X doesn’t exist” seems to require referring to X in the first place. We trace the debate from Russell’s theory of descriptions, through Kripke’s devastating critique in Naming and Necessity, to Meinong’s radical claim that non-existent objects still populate our domain of discourse. Plus: null pointer exceptions as computer science’s Meinongianism, why AI struggles with fictional facts, and why three competing theories—descriptivism, Meinongianism, and abstract realism—each come with a steep philosophical price tag. I hope you enjoy.
TIMESTAMPS:
- 00:00 - The Batman Paradox
- 03:26 - Russell’s Theory of Descriptions
- 06:36 - Kripke’s Rigid Designators
- 09:44 - Meinongian Domain Quantification
- 12:45 - Nuclear and Extra-Nuclear Properties
- 15:50 - Modal Descriptivism and AI
- 18:54 - Presentism and Temporal Ontology
LINKS MENTIONED:
- Diana Pasulka [TOE]: https://youtu.be/E5MuTHUbMUs
- Why I Don’t Buy The Simulation Hypothesis [TOE]: https://youtu.be/3_lBPMc6JRY
- Elan Barenholtz [TOE]: https://youtu.be/A36OumnSrWY
- Naming And Necessity [Book]: https://neuroself.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/naming-and-necessity-full-text.
Mentioned Books
“in philosophy, there's victim's thine, there's tractatus, there's the critique of pure reason, and there's naming and necessities up there.”
“almost everyone thought, man, Russell, you solved it, bro. Then in 1970s, Saul Kripke published naming and necessity. This was a bombshell, much like there are a few bombshells”
Wittgenstein's book about the problems of language and his attempt of describing the world and an philosophical accurate and most of all logical language.
“This was a bombshell, much like there are a few bombshells in philosophy, there's victim's thine, there's tractatus, there's the critique of pure reason,”