Alexius Meinong

Works

• 1902On Assumptions

  Between idea and judgement lies the assumption: thinking that something is the case without believing it, as in supposing, playing, reading fiction or arguing hypothetically; its object is an “objective”, the bearer of truth and falsity.

• 1904On the Theory of Objects

  Programmatic essay for a science of all objects, whether they exist or not: an object has its properties independently of its being, so that “the round square” is round and square although there is no such thing.

Position

Meinong is on the map as the author of the theory of objects, a much-debated idea from the Brentano school. Starting from Brentano’s thesis that every mental act is directed at an object, and from Twardowski’s distinction between content and object, he concluded that the objects of thought need not exist. The golden mountain is golden and a mountain, the round square is round and square: both are objects with properties, though they have no being – a principle he called the independence of so-being from being. Objects may exist (like a horse), subsist (like the difference between red and green) or have no being at all. In “On Assumptions” (1902) he placed, between idea and judgement, the assumption – entertaining a thought without believing it – and called its object an “objective”, an early version of what later philosophers call propositions. He also developed a psychological theory of value, in debate with Ehrenfels. Russell first welcomed his theory and then rejected it in “On Denoting” (1905), arguing that non-existent objects violate the law of non-contradiction; for decades Meinong was known mainly through this critique. Since the 1970s logicians such as Terence Parsons and Richard Routley have revived “Meinongian” theories of non-existent objects.

Life & context

Alexius Meinong was born on 17 July 1853 in Lemberg (Lviv), then in the Austrian Empire, the son of an army officer. He studied history and German philology in Vienna, took a doctorate in history in 1874 and then turned to philosophy under Franz Brentano (1875–78), with whom he worked on Hume. In 1882 he moved to the University of Graz, where he became full professor in 1889 and remained for the rest of his life. There he founded in 1894 the first laboratory of experimental psychology in Austria, and around him formed the “Graz school”, whose members included Christian von Ehrenfels, Stephan Witasek, Vittorio Benussi and Ernst Mally. His eyesight was poor from his youth, and in later life he was almost blind. He died in Graz on 27 November 1920.

Further main works

• Hume-Studien I–II (1877, 1882)
• Psychologisch-ethische Untersuchungen zur Werth-Theorie (1894)
• Über Gegenstände höherer Ordnung und deren Verhältniss zur inneren Wahrnehmung (1899)
• Über Annahmen (1902)
• Über Gegenstandstheorie (1904)
• Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit (1915)