Fictional Objects

Fictional and Aesthetic Objects: Meinong’s Point of View

In contemporary philosophy there are a great many texts on aesthetics and the ontology of narrative discourse, that discuss Meinong’s theses, agreeing or disagreeing. But Meinong never wrote a single book or article on aesthetics or the ontology of art works, nor did he provide a structured system to deal with fictional aesthetic objects. What he wrote on these matters is to be found in texts d...

Fictional Women in Mathematics

This article will argue that the situation for female mathematicians in fiction has improved, but that there is still cause for concern. You may wonder why you should care about this at all since these fictional women are (by definition) not real and therefore unlikely to be dues paying members of the AWM! With this in mind, in addition to providing examples of female mathematicians in literatu...

Mirroring Fictional Others

Fictional Planet Ballardia

The Rock Cycle is a useful pedagogical device. Science-fiction novelist James G. Ballard published a colorful description of a nameless fictional world in 1957 that has an artificially closed Rock Cycle. Were such an anthropogenic cycle instigated for Earth, it would be consistent with James Hutton’s viewpoint on the Earth as a self-repairing machine without an endogenetic end to planetary Geol...

Fictional Game Elements 2016

Gamification has been widely accepted in the HCI community in the last few years. However, the current debate is focused on its short-term consequences, such as effectiveness and usefulness, while its side-effects, long-term criticalities and systemic impacts are rarely raised. This workshop explores the gamification design space from a critical perspective, by using design fictions to help res...