ABSTRACT
Sentences like the one above pose a well-known difficulty for the now standard theory of names. What makes Antony Antony, and not Brutus, is (in the Kripkean view) the fact that Antony originates “from a certain hunk of matter” and has some reasonable properties concerning a given “substance” essential to Antony. In other words, there is an object in the world with the relevant character which, by its very nature, is Antony and not Brutus.1 This is all fine, but then there is something nonsensical about Antony’s statement above. He seems to be referring to a chimerical, counterfactual creature without any referent whatever.
