SOME years ago, a philosophy student in one of my classes — a seminarian — asked me for a suggestion on a worthwhile topic for a thesis. Since I had tired of reading junior theses that were regurgitations of half-digested concepts from philosophers barely understood (at that time, Charles Taylor was a favorite!) I suggested to him a topic that I thought he could write on, free of all dependence on a single philosopher, but challenging enough to engage whatever he may have understood from his metaphysics classes: the reality of virtual reality. It is something to which I have given some thought lately — given that so many, I included, spend plenty of time in virtual space. And that is yet another dimension of the issue: virtual reality inhabits its own space — virtual space, and while metaphors like "cloud" are used, they suggest a universe parallel to that of our everyday lives.

Virtual reality is what the world wide web has made available. Virtual space is the space created by the internet. It includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other sites, including those that make cyberpornography a possibility! One principal feature then of virtual reality is that it is a creature of human ingenuity. As such it mirrors the values, the priorities, the interests, the universe of meaningful themes of persons of the last phase of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. In "Time and Narrative," Paul Ricoeur devotes learned chapters to the examination of fiction as narrative, and he says that what fiction does is open alternative "ways of being," forms of existence, and that is why fiction is both existentially relevant and engaging. To be sure, virtual reality is not fiction, or is it?

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