This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Tim Crane exists. That's one of his many admirable characteristics.

He's the Nightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge.

But suppose Tim Crane did not exist. Night Bridge 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 Nightbridge 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 but you can't ask what is the distance between London and Edinburgh

but you can't ask what is the distance between London and the lost city of

Atlantis because the lost city of Atlantis doesn't exist.

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