by Alexander Bastidas Fry

When we face difficult questions vague answers can offer a feeling of clarity that binary answers cannot. The laws of nature and the foibles of humans do not always allow strict classification into true and false. Even when such a dichotomy exists how do we find the absolute truth? And what is more, how do we know the right question? Everything and everyone seems to have an answer and a question. During moments of introspection, the full moon may even ask you a question, or offer an answer with clarity. The moon is an object that is utterly real and tangible, but it is never quite present or reachable. It alludes to a bright idea that has no consequence. Take this old story,

A monk sat in the forest with three students. He took out his fan and placed it in front of him, saying, “Without calling it a fan, tell me what this is.”

The first said, “You could not call it a slop-bucket.” The master poked him with his stick.

The second and third students were actually rocks that the master had mistaken for students, because it was getting very dark. Suddenly, the master and his pupil felt afraid and alone.

In the distance a wolf howled.

The Zen tradition of paradoxical or even seemingly nonsensical stories like this, a koan, is to provoke doubt in understanding. Or to provoke true insight. Either way we would be fools to not take wisdom offered when there are wolves in the distance, sharks circling, or clouds gathering. Old Buddhist, Zen, and Sufi stories are searching for wisdom or answers to threats hidden in that shadows. But often the stories show all the search is for naught, there is nothing in the shadows. Indeed, many of the reoccurring themes and animals in those stories are not situations we encounter today. In the city there are troubled people on the corner and parking tickets. As I look out the window I see someone getting written a parking ticket. I think that a sort of modern koan is that parking signs that are always written in the negatory; statements which do not state what is permitted, only things which are un-permitted. The modern world casts new-old spells on people. What wisdom do we need in the modern world?

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by Jalees Rehman

Anti-Semitism and the holocaust are among the central themes in the modern German secondary school curriculum. During history lessons in middle school, we learned about anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews in Europe during the middle ages and early modernity. Our history curriculum in the ninth and tenth grades focused on the virulent growth of anti-Semitism in 20^th century Europe, how Hitler and the Nazi party used anti-Semitism as a means to rally support and gain power, and how the Nazi apparatus implemented the systematic genocide of millions of Jews.

Image of a Hitler Youth meeting from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia

In grades 11 to 13, the educational focus shifts to a discussion of the broader moral and political context of anti-Semitism and Nazism. How could the Nazis enlist the active and passive help of millions of “upstanding” citizens to participate in this devastating genocide? Were all Germans who did not actively resist the Nazis morally culpable or at least morally responsible for the Nazi horrors? Did Germans born after the Second World War inherit some degree of moral responsibility for the crimes committed by the Nazis? How can German society ever redeem itself after being party to the atrocities of the Nazis? Anti-Semitism and Nazism were also important topics in our German literature and art classes because the Nazis persecuted and murdered German Jewish intellectuals and artists, and because the shame and guilt experienced by Germans after 1945 featured so prominently in German art and literature.

One purpose of extensively educating Germany school-children about this dark and shameful period of German history is the hope that if they are ever faced with the reemergence of prejudice directed against Jews or any other ethnic or religious group, they will have the courage to stand up for those who are being persecuted and make the right moral choices. As such, it is part of the broader Vergangenheitsbewältigung (wrestling with one's past) in post-war German society which takes place not only in schools but in various public venues. The good news, according to recent research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, is that Germans who attended school after the Second World War have shown a steady decline in anti-Semitism. The bad news: Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a bigger challenge for Germans who attended school under the Nazis because a significant proportion of them continue to exhibit high levels of anti-Semitic attitudes more than half a century after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

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““The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely covered by oceans…(but) if you link two amino acids together to make a protein, you have to remove water.” And that would have been impossible if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—literally a beachhead—to get started.” —Tim Folger , writer, National Geographic, Discover, Scientific American

Beachhead

though landbound, we were all once ships
we understand the sea which undulates within us
we’re bobbing on its swells of time
swept by winds that touch and grind us

few think we’re flawlessly designed
there are breaches in our hulls
we come perilously close to rocky spits,
adrift, each one looking for a beachhead
longing for a place that’s still
while everything around us shifts
the patch of earth by which god’s seas are parted
where future past and present sit
where love and luck may then be started
.

by Jim Culleny
6/19/15

by Misha Lepetic

“I see your infinite form in every direction,
with countless arms, stomachs, faces, and eyes.”
~ Bhagavad-Gītā 11 16

About ten days ago, someone posted on an image on Reddit, a sprawling site that is the Internet's version of a clown car that's just crashed into a junk shop. The image, appropriately uploaded to the 'Creepy' corner of the website, is kind of hard to describe, so, assuming that you are not at the moment on any strong psychotropic substances, or are not experiencing a flashback, please have a good, long look before reading on.

What the hell is that thing? Our sensemaking gear immediately kicks into overdrive. If Cthulhu had had a pet slug, this might be what it looked like. But as you look deeper into the picture, all sorts of other things begin to emerge. In the lower left-hand corner there are buildings and people, and people sitting on buildings which might themselves be on wheels. The bottom center of the picture seems to be occupied by some sort of a lurid, lime-colored fish. In the upper right-hand corner, half-formed faces peer out of chalices. The background wallpaper evokes an unholy copulation of brain coral and astrakhan fur. And still there are more faces, or at least eyes. There are indeed more eyes than an Alex Grey painting, and they hew to none of the neat symmetries that make for a safe world. In fact, the deeper you go into the picture, the less perspective seems to matter, as solid surfaces dissolve into further cascades of phantasmagoria. The same effect applies to the principal thing, which has not just an indeterminate number of eyes, ears or noses, but even heads.

The title of the thread wasn't very helpful, either: “This image was generated by a computer on its own (from a friend working on AI)”. For a few days, that was all anyone knew, but it was enough to incite another minor-scale freakout about the nature and impending arrival of Our Computer Overlords. Just as we are helpless to not over-interpret the initial picture, so we are all too willing to titillate ourselves with alarmist speculations concerning its provenance. This was presented as a glimpse into the psychedelic abyss of artificial intelligence; an unspeakable, inscrutable intellect briefly showed us its cards, and it was disquieting, to put it mildly. Is that what AI thinks life looks like? Or stated even more anxiously, is that what AI thinks life should look like?

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by Jonathan Kujawa

The mathematics of the everyday is often surprisingly deep and difficult. John Conway famously uses the departmental lounge of the Princeton mathematics department as his office. He claims to spend his days playing games and doing nothing with whomever happens to be in the lounge, but his conversations about seemingly mundane questions has led to no end of delightful and deep mathematics. Chatting with math folks about the everyday can quickly lead to undiscovered country.

A much loved tradition among any group of mathematicians is talking math in the department lounge at afternoon tea. Nearly every department has such a tea. Some are once a week, some every day. There may or may not be cookies. What is certain, though, is that everyone from the retired emeriti to undergraduate students are welcome to stop by for a revitalizing beverage and a chat. More often than not it leads to talk about interesting math. You can begin to imagine why John Conway hangs out in the Princeton math lounge and Alfréd Rényi joked “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems” [1].

You might think the conversation swirls around the work of the latest winners of the Abel prize or folks trying to impress by describing the deep results of their morning's efforts. There is some of that. But just as often the conversation turns into an energetic discussion about the mathematics of the everyday. Several years ago I was involved in a heated discussion about whether or not the election laws of the State of Georgia could allow for a certain local election to become caught in an endless loop of runoff votes. The local media's description of the electoral rules seemed to allow this absurdity. Of course the argument could easily be resolved with a quick Google search, but where's the fun in that? A search was done, but not until all possible scenarios were thoroughly thrashed out and a nickel wagered.

My colleagues, Kimball Martin and Ravi Shankar, asked themselves an innocuous tea-time question: “How often should you clean your room?” Easy to ask, the question is surprisingly difficult to solve. In math problems come in three flavors: so easy as to be not very interesting, so hard as to be unsolvable, and the sweet spot in the middle where the questions are both interesting and solvable. When to clean your room turns out to be a question of the third kind.

The Stockholm Public Library

To have a chance in using math to answer a question you have to figure out what you're really asking. In the end Kimball and Ravi settled on the following scenario. Imagine you have a collection of objects which are all in order. For example, they could be books in alphabetical order on a shelf. After you've read a book you drop it on the large pile of books on your desk. From time to time you think of a book you'd like to read (let's say you'd like to reread the collected works of Shel Silverstein). Since the books in the pile are in no particular order, if the Shel Silverstein book is in the pile you have to go through the books one by one to find it. It's much faster to find the book when it's on the shelf. On the other hand, it takes time to put the books back on the shelf.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

Following the murders of nine members of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by 21 year old Dylann Roof, many have noted the significance of Roof's being born in 1994. Despite growing up in “post-racial” America, in an allegedly “colorblind” generation, Roof is a white supremacist who adopted the symbols of some of the most patently racist and violent institutions in global history—namely the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and the white African colony of Rhodesia. Suddenly, the optimistic talk of millennials being open-minded and racism being a fading relic is ringing false. Survey data about those born after 1980 is now being dredged up revealing that white millennials are not considerably more tolerant than Generation X (born between 1965-1980), or even their parents, the Baby Boomers. Yet, the “stubborn myth” of the unprejudiced millennial persists despite plenty of available information to the contrary.

The main problem with this myth is twofold—the first is that millennials are a homogenous group of bike-riding, social media preoccupied, workplace disruptors. It doesn't take much reflection to realize that the “millennial” that the media is fond of writing about is actually a very small portion of the 65 million people born between 1980-1995. The vast majority of them can't afford fair trade organic coffee and in some demographic groups aren't college educated or stably employed. As Emily Badger writes in the Washington Post, “Often in the media (and I'll raise my hand here), we evoke the word ‘millennial' to describe a subset of people born after 1980 who hold college degrees and live in cities. We're not talking about 20-year-old single moms in small towns, or fast-food workers in the suburbs trying to get by on only a high school diploma.” Dylann Roof is a representative of the type of millennial that publications like the New York Times ignore in their coverage of the young adults currently living in major metropolises and being hired by Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Hence the surprise when Roof's values appear to conflict with widely disseminated views about the tolerance of his generation.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

I tend towards a fairly hardcore social constructionism about most mental-health diagnoses. I've read Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking, and I'm well aware of the historicity of ways of classifying and enacting whatever it is that's eating at our souls. World War I ends and young men stop fuguing; no one has come down with an attack of St. Vitus' Dance for some centuries now. These days PTSD is in fashion, the proximate causes of which range from surviving heavy combat in Iraq to having to read Ovid's Metamorphoses in a humanities survey course.

I'm not saying we aren't all feeling something, that we don't all have a current running through us that at one minute charges us up with the life force only to send us convulsing to the ground with its cruel and insupportable shocks the next. I'm saying that how we describe this current has much more to do with the way the people around us are chattering than with the way our own private neutrons are firing.

Except when it comes to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This, I maintain, is a real illness, like diabetes. I know because I suffered from it for a few years in my early twenties, and the experience of it remains one of the most basic autobiographical facts in my repertoire, the talking-point I pull out most readily when it comes to the difficult matter of who I am and what my whole thing is.

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by Tamuira Reid

It’s a hunch. It’s a diagnosis. It’s a long name that leaves you tongue-tied. It’s being horrified over the fact that PDD sounds more like an STD.

It’s blaming yourself. It’s blaming his father. It’s blaming God.

It’s watching a “normal” kid at the playground and wishing, for a split second, that he was yours. It’s hating yourself for wishing that.

It’s puzzles and foam boards and stacking cups. It’s medicine or no medicine. It’s shut-the-fuck-up-vaccinations-don’t-cause-this. But what does? It’s special schools. It’s special diets. It’s the word “special”. It’s cognitive testing. It’s being afraid that he is dumb. Afraid that he is trapped. It’s being afraid to project anything.

It’s sensory processing issues. It’s having to look this up. It’s flapping hands and toys arranged in lines. It’s the crooked smile. It’s a head banging against the wall. It’s his fists in my chest. It’s the word “pervasive”. The word “delayed”. It’s spending too much time in forum chat rooms with all the other mothers with bad news.

It’s dinosaur sheets. It’s trips to the moon. It’s Elmo and Dora and Thomas the Train. It’s trains. It’s trains, trains, trains. It’s taking the trains away. It’s play with this instead. It’s let’s do a puzzle. It’s feeling like a bad parent. It’s feeling like a bad egg donor. It’s feeling bad.

It’s tantrums on city sidewalks. It’s pulling his limp frame up and down Broadway. It’s silence where words should be. It’s classical music and music therapy and dance classes without much dancing.

It’s tears for no reason. It’s waiting rooms. It’s waiting.

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In the beginning was Ignorance, which, after seven days of
metastization, took no rest, not even a nap, and saw that it was good
—or, if not 'good', at least very effective.”
……………………………………. —Fascist Bible 1:1

Yankee Disenlightenment

it was once considered
not good
not to know

to know nothing

to be willfully stupid
yet not lose face

to purposely
un-understand
the shape of light and
lay of land

to be a barren dumbass
in gnostic space

to immediately drain
each inconvenient drop of fresh new rain
which, like elixir, drips into our
cranial mixer

to refuse to skewer
enigma

to not rip off
the scabs of old scrolls
papered over wormholes

to not burrow to
the middle of myth
to mine the truth
that makes it stick

to unwrap the burial cloth of corpses
centuries dead then deny their deadness
with occult discourses

to treat the factual as merely
fleeting or inactual

to elevate superstition,
and call it Tierras de Dios
wherein a singularity
is mysteriously split into a trio
and god becomes a thing
cleaved like other things,
malleable, meager, mortal
(a shade of god’s awesome former self)
to become The Pale One most loudly worshipped
in the land of guiltless gringos
.

by Jim Culleny
5/16/15

by Ahmed Humayun

We are overwhelmed by choices and decisions in our integrated, interdependent, information-rich world. We often find it difficult to identify what is important, to solve or even ameliorate pressing problems. We may live in a time of unsurpassed abundance – at least, in the advanced, industrialized regions of the world – but we are unequipped to deal with the implications of unprecedented choice. Thanks to the Internet and social media, vast rivers of information course through laptops and tablets and smartphones, constantly threatening to drown us. In this type of world, how should we – as individuals, professionals, and nations – focus on the relevant information, attack the right problems, generate creative alternatives, and make effective decisions?

In Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, Donald Sull, a senior lecturer at MIT, and Kathleen Eisenhardt, a professor at Stanford's School of Engineering, locate the answer in ‘simple rules'. Their starting point is the work of Warren Weaver, an early 20th century leader in the science of complexity who categorized the stages of scientific eras as a progression through simple, uncertain, and complex problems. ‘Simple' problems can be addressed through powerful formulas that relate a few variables, such as force = mass x acceleration, while in ‘uncertain' problems, probability and statistics are used to predict the average behavior of large numbers of things.

This leaves untouched the third and final class of problem – the ‘complex' problem, which dominates the era in which we now live. As Sull and Eisenhardt write: ‘Scientists can predict the path of two billiard balls with precision, and the average behavior of two million gas particles. But what about the messy middle ground, where twenty or thirty components interact with one another in unexpected ways?' It is this middle ground, the terrain of the complex problem, that simple rules can help navigate. Instead of throwing complex solutions at complex problems, the best response is simplicity.

What are ‘simple rules'? You sort of know them when you see them, though Sull and Eisenhardt identify the general principles that appear to apply across many of these cases. Successful simple rules are few in number, customized to a particular context, applied to a well defined activity or decision, and offer just the right mix between guidance and discretion. When it comes to collective behavior, simple rules are easier to remember and implement, especially when we are not at our best. We are most in need of rules to optimize effort when we are weak, not when we are strong.

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Lines

6 July 1956
General Dwight D Eisenhower,
Embassy of the United States
Karachi. Dear Mr. President,
First of all, I wish you good luck

in your bid for re-election.
You’re my president as well
leader of all who seek freedom

from oppression of all hues.
America is a bulwark for liberty,
a terror for tyrants.
We Kashmiris want to be free.
I’m a mother. I hate false lines

rending sisters from brothers.
I wish to bring up all my children
together. Sadly, a Cease-Fire Line

divides my two older children
in Indian-occupied Kashmir,
from their younger four siblings
in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.
Children who grow up apart

become strangers later in their lives.
It breaks my heart.
The nuns at Jesus and Mary Convent

in Murree easily cross the Line
to teach at the Presentation Convent
in Srinagar: Why can’t my children?
Is Justice blind?
I urge you, Mr. President, command

one of your generals to bring
his tanks here to at once
re-unite Kashmir.

Our young men and women are prepared
to spill blood on the front line.
We want the world to know our resolve.
Please help us air our determination
by printing this in the New York Times.

I pray for your victory in November.
Faithfully yours, Mrs. Maryam Jan,
“Katrina,” Pindi Point, Murree.

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by Paul Braterman

Good to eat, in traditional Mediterranean and oriental cuisines. Good food for farmed fish, not that they (the fish, I mean) really have much choice in the matter. Good as a source of possible biofuels. And now good for almost a million pounds of research funding. Your sister, the sea squirt, actual species Ciona intestinalis, coming shortly to a fjord near you.

The sea squirt is the ultimate in middle-aged complacency. It starts off looking a little bit like a tadpole, with a brain (of sorts, “cerebral vesicle” in diagram), a tail with a nerve cord and a stiffening rod (the notochord), an eye (ocellus), and a balance organ (statocyst). The reason it looks like a tadpole at this stage is because it is like a tadpole. The notochord is related to the backbone in vertebrates, a spinal cord runs parallel to it along the flexible tail, and at the head end of the spinal cord there primitive brain coordinates sensory inputs.

Anatomy of larval tunicate (John Houseman via Wikimedia)

But when it matures, it sticks its head on a rock, and changes into its adult form, which is not much more than a mouth (branchial siphon), a stomach, and an exit tube (atrial siphon). It is a hermaphrodite, with one testis and one ovary. Both of these ejaculate into the exit tube, and there are rather complicated mechanisms to prevent self-fertilisation. It protects itself by growing an outer coat, or tunic, made of cellulose-like material, hence the scientific name name tunicate. The sea squirt eats, or to more exact reabsorbs, notochord, tail, sense organs and nervous system, since these are no longer needed, while it feeds by wafting water into its mouth cavity, and filtering out suspended particles.

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by Randolyn Zinn

Read Jeffrey Renard Allen’s masterful novel Song of the Shank (published by Greywolf Press) and you'll meet Thomas Greene Wiggins, a 19^th century slave and musical genius who performed as Blind Tom. The book earned rave reviews, was named a New York Times’ Notable Book of 2014, and was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award. This spring Allen was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation award to write a new book and this fall he will become a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virgina. He earned a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been a Professor of English at Queens College and an Instructor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at The New School.

We met at the Cornelia Street Café in NYC last month where our conversation began with a discussion about the style of Song of the Shank.

Randolyn Zinn: Your narrative stance reaches deeply into the heart of whatever you’re describing, be it place, period, landscape or a character’s interiority.

Jeffrey Renard Allen: That sounds about right. I was having a conversation about this with my editor. I said that I have a thick style. Meaning that in this book, in particular, there are a lot of voices. I am an expansive writer and this density happens at the level of the sentence. Or the paragraph. I’m interested in all the avenues of a character.

RZ: You don’t stand back at a distance describing characters; you write from the center of his or her experience and readers are pulled right in.

JA: Yeah, I’m very much about trying to write through the mind of the character, yet have enough liberty to be elastic to do interesting things with the language.

RZ: You don’t use quotation marks around dialogue.

JA: Maybe I have in some stories. But since I began to write seriously, going back to the 80s, I’ve tended to do away with that.

RZ: Why? Because it feels extraneous? Because it’s obvious, as readers, that we understand when a character is speaking?

JA: I think there are a couple of things. Some of it comes from studying writers I like. Joyce was the first person to do away with quotation marks around dialogue. Other writers don’t use them: John Edgar Wideman, a lot of Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy. When you do away with the quotation marks, t forces the reader to pay attention to what’s happening on the page. The writer makes the narration and the action blend in with the dialogue. It all becomes one voice in a way, even though you still have the distinct voices of the characters, their speech. I like that the language can work in such a way that it all blends together.

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by Charlie Huenemann

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” —Woody Allen

Set aside any belief in an afterlife, even the vaguely hopeful “I’ll return to the energy of the universe” sort of view. The realization that your run of life is finite is troubling. At first, when we begin to think about the full extent of our lives, we tend to think of that extent as a short stretch of time found within a very broad scope of time: I exist for several decades within – what? – billions and billions of years. It’s a tiny blip, hardly anything at all. And, automatically, we associate the very short episode called “our lives” with more ordinary episodes, like seeing a movie on a Sunday afternoon. In that case, we enjoy the movie, and after that, we drive home. But then a second realization hits: after this life, there will be no driving home. There will not be anything for us – no recalling of favorite moments, no do-overs, not even a moment of nostalgia. Nothing. That life we just had will be all we ever are, forever. The pit of existential despair opens before us, and boy howdy, does it ever stink.

Both Socrates and Seneca defined philosophy as preparing for death, and there’s no denying that if we haven’t come to terms with this fact – I will die – we have not yet found wisdom. Now I’m as foolish and troubled as anyone else, but I have come across a line of thought that, at least when I manage to remember it, makes that pit of existential despair disappear.

The line of thought comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though it can also be found in the writings of Epicurus. They diagnose our problem as arising from that first view we adopted, the one that sees life as an episode within a larger frame of time. Sometimes that perspective is perfectly accurate: namely, when we look at other people’s lives, and we note how there were things happening both before they lived and after they died. Their lives are rather like Sunday afternoon movies to us in this regard. But – according to the Epicurus/Wittgenstein line of thought – when it comes to our own lives, that same picture does not apply: for of course there will not be, in our lives, any events before we live or after we die. When I try to adopt a perspective that sees my life as a short expanse of time within a larger expanse of time, I am trying to adopt a nonsensical point of view. I am trying to view my life from a life that is both my life and not my life.

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by Carl Pierer

Let us suppose Pegasus does not exist. This simple idea has proven to lead to plenty of philosophical trouble. Because what exactly is the thing that does not exist? Quine puts the “Riddle of Non-being” as: “Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not?” The problematic coin has two sides. First, it seems that in supposing to talk about Pegasus at all, we are simultaneously asserting that something that answers to the name of Pegasus is – in some sense. This is the semantic side: If Pegasus is not, in any sense of the word, what would we be talking about?

In the same essay, Quine states the problem of ontology as: “What is there?” and answers immediately: “Everything”. This approach leads to the same problem, albeit from a different angle: if everything exists, how can we deny the existence of any particular thing, e.g. Pegasus? We may call this the logical side of the problem. For example, if A says Pegasus flies, then A is committed to the claim that something that flies exists. However, if A says Pegasus does not exist, how can the obvious contradiction of asserting that something exists that does not exist be avoided?

Quine proposes the following. The apparent contradiction in stating that something does not exist can be resolved thusly: a statement denying the existence of something, say Pegasus, can be analysed in terms of its logical structure. So, to say that Pegasus does not exist means simply ~∃x (x is Pegasus).

This by itself does not solve the problem, as a further instance of existential generalisation creates the same problem this was set to solve: ~∃x (x is Pegasus) becomes ∃y~∃x (x is y) – meaning again there exists a thing such that it does not exist. To avoid this trouble, Quine suggests – following Russell – that the proper name “Pegasus” can be substituted by a description, e.g. “the winged horse that was captured by Bellerophon”. Hence if F = the winged horse that was captured by Bellerophon, the sentence becomes: ~∃x Fx and no existential generalisation can be made. The logical part of the problem is thus solved.

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