By Juan Uriagereka
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 non-sensical about Antony’s statement above: he seems to be referring to a chimeral, counterfactual creature without any referent whatever.