| Summary: | My general concern is how to translate modern formal semantics into medieval metaphysics, itself a theory about objects. I shall use the formal model in Nonexistent Objects by Terence Parsons as a test case for the modern formal system, and the philosophy of Avicenna as one for medieval metaphysics. My investigation has four parts: 1) a summary of Avicenna’s general metaphysical scheme, the threefold distinction of quiddity; 2) translating Parsons’s theory into medieval terms; 3) the location of nonexistent objects of various sorts in Avicenna’s theory; and 4) comparing the theories of Parsons, and concluding that the theories of Parsons and Avicenna are not incommensurate paradigms as Parsons suggests. Rather, they are different theories but under the same research tradition.
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