Fiction and History
Not much blogging these days because for some reason my wrist hurts, and I think it's better to let it rest for a while. So here are just a couple of brief remarks, typed with my left hand, about some parallels between fictional and and historical characters.
We might distinguish two modes of speaking about historical characters:
1. Past: Immanuel Kant is a philosopher; he lives at Königsberg; etc.
2. Present: Immanuel Kant does not exist; he does not live at Königsberg; etc.
Since these statements contradict each other, they can't all be literally true. A simple way out is to take the Present Statements at face value and reinterpret the Past Statements by prefixing something like "at the time": At the time (of Immanual Kant), Kant lives at Königsberg; but in fact, or at present, he doesn't. (In ordinary language, tense often replaces the prefix.)
But note that some things are true of Kant at present. For instance, even though he is not (at present) a human being, he is (at present) a well-known philosopher. And even though (at present) he does not live at any place at all, he is (at present) often critisized as an idealist, and judged to be more important than Herder.
Now we decided to take such Present statements at face value. And it seems unlikely that we can paraphrase them all so that we don't need to mention Kant any more, but only, say, the name "Kant". So we have to accept that Kant exists (at present). What kind of object is he? Abstract and ghostly, for he exists at no place in particular. He is a theoretical object of philosophy.
Note also by the way that some Past statements about Kant are neither clearly true nor false: Was he more than 50 years old? Was he sitting or standing up? If we took seriously Past predications, we would have to admit that there is something that both sits and doesn't sit, or that neither sits nor doesn't sit. -- We would have to give up classical logic. Taking only the Present statements at face value frees us from this burdon: Kant, being an abstract object, definitely doesn't sit. He may stand in the being-in-the-past relation to Sitting, but this is not to be confused with ordinary sitting.
This view, I hope you agree, is crazy. More interestingly, it also fails to account for many statements that are neither clearly Past nor Present, e.g. "Peter dresses and behaves like Immanuel Kant, whom he admires much". It's not that at the time of Kant, Peter dressed and behaved like Kant. Nor does he dress and behave like Kant does now, i.e. not at all.
The reasonable approach is to admit that Kant really has all the properties he is attributed to in true Past statements. When it is indeterminate whether or not he has the property of sitting, this is because we haven't clearly stated exactly which time we're talking about.