Quine, in \u2018On What There Is\u2019, discusses a problem that he calls the \u2018Platonic riddle of nonbeing\u2019. The riddle is this: \u2018Nonbeing must in some sense be; otherwise what is it that there is not?\u2019 (Quine 1948, 21). Take Pegasus, the flying stallion of Bellerophon, and the statement, \u2018Pegasus does not exist\u2019. On the one hand, if the word \u2018Pegasus\u2019 does not have a referent, it seems that there is nothing there to negate; on the other, if it does have a referent, it seems that we are forced to affirm and deny Pegasus\u2019 existence, which is incoherent. Quine suggests that Plato grasped the second horn of this dilemma, nicknaming it \u2018Plato\u2019s beard\u2019. According to this solution, empty names refer to\u00a0subsistent<\/i>\u00a0entities, that is, entities that have some form of being, but do not exist. But was Quine right that Plato had a beard? In this paper, I set out the Platonic riddle of non-being in the way that Plato did in the\u00a0Theaetetus<\/i>\u00a0and the\u00a0Sophist –\u00a0<\/i>not as a riddle about negative existential statements in particular, but as a riddle about how negation is possible in the first place. I argue that Plato\u2019s own solution to the riddle turns on rejecting the view that predicating non-being of something is an assertion of its non-existence, or its being nothing, in favour of the view that to negate is to assert a relative difference between an existing subject and its negated predicate. I argue that, given some of Plato’s assumptions about the non-transparency of reference, his difference interpretation of negation can solve the Platonic riddle of nonbeing, but not in the tangled way that Quine alleged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Quine, in \u2018On What There Is\u2019, discusses a problem that he calls the \u2018Platonic riddle of nonbeing\u2019. The riddle is this: \u2018Nonbeing must in some sense be; otherwise what is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","_tribe_events_is_hybrid":"","_tribe_events_is_virtual":"","_tribe_events_virtual_video_source":"","_tribe_events_virtual_embed_video":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button_text":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_at":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_to":[],"_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_event":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_views":"","_tribe_events_virtual_url":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[25],"class_list":["post-14431","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry","tribe_events_cat-metaphysics-and-logic-group","cat_metaphysics-and-logic-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/14431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/14431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14717,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/14431\/revisions\/14717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14431"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=14431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}