Real Robinson Crusoe

What is the ontological status of fiction? Do fictional people exist? In Serious Reflections during the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), Robinson Crusoe struggles with this very question. Defending his claim to exist in the face of accusations that his entire story was fanciful, Crusoe con cedes that his life did not happen in any conventional sense; nonetheless, he asks readers to think of his life as real. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empirical philosophy recognized a perilous disconnect between knowledge and the actual existence of things in the world. Informed by recent work on the metaphysics of fictional entities, this article reads Crusoe's ontological self-defence in the context of John Locke's attempt, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), to prove that knowledge was real despite being mediated entirely by our ideas. "Fiction" provides an inaccurate framework for under standing the books we call eighteenth-century novels because the concept entails ontological commitments at odds with the kind of knowledge these stories represent.