ABSTRACT

The American Museum of Natural History is putting on a big new show of creatures that don’t actually exist, “Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids.”

New Yorker, June 4, 2007: 38

[P]hilosophy cannot concern itself exclusively with things that exist. Russell 1905b: 531

There is a perfectly ordinary sense of the word “exists” in which Sherlock Holmes does not exist, and that is the sense that I intend when I call Holmes a nonexistent object.