Meinongs Leben vollzog sich in engen räumlichen Grenzen. Es scheint kaum von besonderen Höhepunkten gekennzeichnet zu sein. Als neunjähriger, im Jahre 1862, verließ er seine Geburtsstadt Lemberg und ging nach Wien, um dort die Schule zu besuchen und später deutsche Philologie und Geschichte zu studieren. Nach Abschluß einer Dissertation über Arnold von Brescia wandte er sich der Philosophie zu und habilitierte sich auf Empfehlung von Franz Brentano mit einer Arbeit über David Hume. Ein schweres Augenleiden, das sehr zeitig schon zu einer fast vollständigen Blindheit führte und das er mit großem Erfindungsreichtum vor Familie, Freunden und administrativen Einrichtungen zu verbergen suchte, hat sein Leben maßgeblich bestimmt. Meinongs weitere akademische Karriere, die Beziehungen zu seiner Frau Doris, zu seinen Freunden und Studenten werden unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Sehschwäche nachgezeichnet.

Meinong's thought is considered in relation to several major conceptual problems, including the Frege-Russell thesis that words like is are multiply ambiguos and Aristotle's treatment of existence. This treatment leads to a problem of how to interpret quantifiers. The three main possible interpretations are: (i) quantifiers as ranging over actual individuals (or individuals existing in some one world); (ii) quantifiers as ranging over a set of possible individuals; (iii) quantifiers merely as a way of specifying the interdependencies of the concepts (forms) specified by syllogistic terms. The subsequent history of philosophers' and logicians' treatments of existence is characterized by a tension between (i)-(iii). Meinong's position is in the main (iii) whereas Russell in his On Denoting defended (i). The contrast between (i) and (iii) has a counterpart in nineteenth-century discussions about foundations of mathematics.

Re-explored are certain item-theory theses, major problem zones, and newer puzzles and, together therewith, prospects for liberalizing and pluralizing item-theory. Undoubtedly item-theory may be further liberalized, partly by further dissociation from object-theory and the restrictions object imposes, but primarily through substantial deregulation of the styles of characterisations permitted. Then almost anything goes; nonetheless what results is a sufficiently well-organised smooth-running sistological anarchism. Characterisation is dispersed through a federation of regions: only in old central city regions do the characterisation postulates of older object-theory regularly hold; in the expanding suburbs characterisation by local assumption and postulation (as in neutral postulate-theory) is a distinctive mode, while out in the country implicit intentional characterisation (including ostension and perception, dreaming and imagining) is a common mode. Put differently, there is a rich variety of sources yielding item specifications; only in places like the old city do structural descriptions of items enjoy formerly-imagined priority, but elsewhere alternative characterization principles may operate. However what holds in situations as a result of such local or regional characterisation may be far removed from what is actual. Characters may be only make-believe or suppositional presented character may differ from more genuine articles, and so on. Bringing the items involved into central evaluation markets, where truth value is assessed, may require preparation of the items, with pruning or regularisation of their properties. Here, at this semantical stage, full pluralization offers further freedom, that is pluralization of truth, with a plurality of actual worlds. A single assignment of truth, the truth at the actual world, is no longer de rigueur; a truth net may be differently cast, different assignments may be adopted, and a selection among alternatives perhaps made. Within this liberalized pluralized setting, resolutions of puzzles induced by certain problem-making items are ventured.

I intend to take into account Meinong's theory of objects from a point of view allowed by the author himself, when he agrees that the proper "place" for such a doctrine is the theory of knowledge. According to this suggestion, I think it convenient to explain the doctrine at issue in the light of the definition of knowing as a "double" act, in which the object known is "in front o f the knowing act itself as something comparatively autonomous. From this point of view a comparison with Husserl's "pure logic" - as Meinong again suggests - as well as a valuation of the part played by our philosopher in their common Opposition to psychologism seem to be of interest.Pure logic seems to answer in the most adequate way the demands that induce Meinong to elaborate a theory of pure objects: such objects are taken into consideration as to their positivity and possibility founded on equally pure operations of a subject. At the same time pure logic provides us with a clue to the ambiguity of Außersein: as a matter of fact, Meinong, freeing himself from the prejudice in favor of what is actual, remains involved in what I would call a prejudice "in favor of what has being"; he thinks it necessary to resort to an assumption, that is to a simulation of being in order to explain our thinking of a non-being object. Furthermore according to him an assumpion is in general demanded in order to think of an object as to his so-being, that is of the outside-being object.There are two orders of questions: the first one regards the "formal" generality of the fundamental gnosiological problems, leaving out of consideration every "matter" of knowledge, the second refers to the gnosiological-phenomenological foundation of the concepts and of the laws of pure logic. They are absolutely inseparable, and yet strictly distinct. The first order should be the right place for the Außersein of pure objects.

Non-existence provides big problems for ontology and modest for logic. Logical problems of non-existence consist in licensing inferences in which sentences with empty terms are involved. The standard predicate logic solves this question by presupposing that every individual constant has an object to which it refers. This means that empty domains are excluded from semantics for the first-order logic. However, there is a temptation to consider logic without existential presuppositions.The ontological problem of non-existence leads to the question of the meaning of 'nothing'. We encounter "various conceptions of nothing" in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to our times. However, nothing (or nothingness) is always a negation of being. Since we have distributive and collective (mereological) concepts of being, we also should distinguish nothing in the distributive and mereological meaning. This difference is important because only the former leads to the paradox of nothing of all nothings, analogical to the paradox of all sets. A closer analysis of the nothing in the distributive sense shows that any meaningful talk about non-existence requires a relativisation to a fixed domain of discourse. This seems; to entail that the empty set is the formal model of nothing what means that the concept of absolute nothing in the distributive sense is simply inconsistent. To some extent, being and nothing are mutually dual. This motivates that the concept of nothing is governed by so-called dual logic connected with processes of rejection. More specifically, statements on "nothing" are not asserted but rejected.

The major goal of this paper is to argue that a well known argument to overturn the principle that coextensive predicates substitute in any statement without alteration of truth value can be avoided - even in the simplest of languages. Apparently this can be done nonartificially only by expanding the universe with nonexisting objects. It is not proved that the principle of substitution salva veritate holds in Meinongian model structures, but in fact it does - as any completeness proof of free logics based on inner domain-outer domain semantics will show. I f - as some have suggested - Meinong's views are compatible with the attitudes of a complete extensionalist, and he subscribed to the outlined modern theory of predication, there is no escape from Außersein. That may seem terribly obvious, but in the light of the development of free logics, more than mere conviction is needed. This dogmatic intuition is supplanted with some strong inclining reasons.

It is tempting to think that Meinong overlooked the "specific/nonspecific" distinction. For example, 'I am looking for a grey horse' may either mean that there is a specific horse I am looking for (e.g. one I lost), or just that I am grey-horse-seeking. The former reading, and not the latter, requires for its truth that there be a grey horse. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether it is defensible to maintain Meinong's theory here: to take nonspecific reading of any verb concerning a possibly non-existent but incomplete object. This requires essential appeal to the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties. Included is a discussion of criticisms of Meinong's own theory, and of the Medieval theory of ampliation, according to which psychological discourse can "ampliate" a term such as 'chimera' so as to stand for one or more things that cannot exist, yet are chimeras. The paper concludes inconclusively.

The notion of state of affairs was introduced as the complexly signifiable in the Late Scholasticism and rediscovered by Logicians like Bolzano and Frege. While Bolzano and Frege were primarily interested in the nature of objective truths students of Brentano, among others Meinong, Twardowski and Husserl, developed similar concepts starting out with an interest in the nature of mental acts and judgement. Both Frege's and Meinong's conceptions face similar problems concerning complex referents which are diagnosed to stem from confusions of complexes of properties with complex properties.

Gilbert Ryle wrote that "Meaning-theory expanded just when and just in so far as it was released from that 'Fido'-Fido box, the lid of which was never even lifted by Meinong". This paper sets out to relieve Ryle's oversimplification about Meinong and the role of meaning theory in his thought. One step away from canine simplicity about meaning is the recognition of a distinction between sense and reference, such as we find in Frege, Husserl, and the early Russell. In Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit (1915) Meinong seems to corroborate Ryle when he writes, "Word-meanings are objects", but immediately after this, he qualifies it: "Word-meanings are very often auxiliary objects". The distinction between auxiliary and target objects in Meinong's later work allows us to attribute to him a theory of sense and reference which shows him to have indeed lifted the box-lid.

Philosophers in the field of analytic metaphysics have begun gradually to come to terms with the fact that there are entities in a range of categories not dreamt of in the set-theory and predicate-logic-based ontologies of their forefathers. Examples of such entia minora would include: boundaries, places, events, states, holes, shadows, individual colour- and tone-instances (tropes), together with combinations of these and associated simple and complex universal species or essences, states of affairs, judgment-contents, and myriad abstract structures of the sorts which are studied by the mathematical sciences. How, as hunter-gatherer ontologists, are we to bring order into this vast array? How are we to gauge the ontological merits of given candidate entities, and how are we to understand their relation to entities of more humdrum sorts? Meinong, it turns out, offers a very simple answer to all of these questions.

Es werden die Fragen gestellt: (1) was sind unvollständige Gegenstände und wie sind sie gekennzeichnet; (2) wie beziehen sich die unvollständigen Gegenstände auf die Eigenschaften, die sie nicht besitzen; und (3) wie beziehen sich die unvollständigen Gegenstände auf jene Eigenschaften, die sie besitzen; und mögUche Antworten diskutiert. Die Beziehung zwischen unvollständigen Gegenständen und dem Prinzip des ausgeschlossenen Dritten wird untersucht und das Problem näher beleuchtet, wie es möglich ist, jene Gegenstände anzunehmen, ohne das Prinzip notwendig zu verletzen.

In Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit entwickelt Meinong seine Theorie der unvollständigen Gegenstände. Der Begriff der Unvollständigkeit wird eingeführt mittels expliziter Bezugnahme auf den Satz vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten: Ein Gegenstand ist unvollständig genau dann, wenn für ihn der Satz vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten nicht gilt. M. a. W.: x ist unvollständig, wenn nicht für jede Eigenschaft P gilt, daß x P hat oder daß x P nicht hat. Alle existierenden und bestehenden Gegenstände sind vollständig; Gegenstände wie das Dreieck in abstracto oder der Gegenstand etwas Blaues sollen dagegen unvollständig sein. Meinong unterscheidet zwei Arten der Negation:(Ne) Es ist nicht der Fall, daß x p hat. (Externe Negation)(Ni) X hat nicht-P (Interne Negation)Meinong selbst stellt fest, daß in bezug auf die externe Negation der Satz vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten uneingeschränkt gültig ist. Um zu verstehen, was es heißt, daß ein Gegenstand unvollständig ist, erscheint es daher unumgänglich, Klarheit darüber zu gewinnen, was eigentlich mit der internen Negation zum Ausdruck gebracht wird. Es wird eine Interpretation der internen Negation vorgeschlagen, und es soll gezeigt werden, daß es gemäß dieser Interpretation überhaupt keine Gegenstände gibt, die unvollständig im Sinne Meinongs sind.

Meinong introduces the concept of implexive being and nonbeing to explain the metaphysics of universals, and as a contribution to the theory of reference and perception. Meinong accounts for Aristotle's doctrine of the inherence of secondary substances in primary substances in object theory terms as the implection of incomplete universals in complete existent or subsistent objects. The derivative notion of implexive so-being is developed by Meinong to advance an intuitive modal semantics that admits degrees of possibility. A set theoretical interpretation of Meinong's mereological concept of the implection of incomplete beingless objects in existent or subsistent complete objects is proposed. The implications of Meinong's concept of implection are exploited to answer extensionalist objections about "Meinong's jungle", defending the ontic economy of an extraontological neo-Meinongian semantic domain that supports individual reference and true predication of constitutive properties to beingless objects.

The paper begins by considering Russell's criticism of Meinong's theory of objects and Sosein that center on the notions of negation and existence. The discussion raises issues about functions, properties, predication, the "concept" of existence and relations. These lead to a consideration of recent revivals of moderate nominalism in the form of trope theories. An argument against such theories suggests a fundamental principle of ontology and a reformulation of the nominalism-realism dispute.

Contemporary formalisations of Meinong's theory of objects prove that Russell's accusation of inconsistency of the theory is not valid. However, in the same formalisations there has appeared a new source of potential inconsistency. Theories of objects inspired by Meinong's ontology usually include, in addition to basic principles of the ontology, abstraction-axioms for defining objects and properties (relations). Although these axioms seem to be perfectly acceptable, they lead to paradoxes when adopted without any restrictions. These paradoxes may be understood as paradoxes of size (not of self-referentiality): too many objects or too many properfies are defined by the axioms. We can avoid them at the cost of counterintuifive stipulations, some of them similar to those applied in set theory or in higher-order logics (like a stratificafion of formulas). We need however to look for phenomenologically well grounded protecfions against paradoxes. This search can deepen our understanding of the nature of Meinongian objects.

In loser Anlehnung an Meinong wird untersucht, ob sich in unserem Denken apriorische Elemente finden. Solche Elemente können nur abstrakt, das heißt, begrifflich sein. Der Aufsatz beleuchtet dieses Thema anhand zweier Fragenkomplexe: (1) der Frage, ob es apriorische Begriffe gibt. Diese Frage wird anhand der drei Aspekte Abstrakfion, „naturgemäß" apriorische Begriffe, zusammengesetzte oder durch Definifion konstruierte Begriffe diskufiert. Und (2) anhand apriorischer Überlegungen, die keinen Anspruch auf Wissen erheben, aber dennoch die Annahme apriorischer Elemente nahelegen: Diese Überlegungen können sich auf den wissenschaftlichen Bereich beziehen, aber auch nur auf den der Fiktion.

The essay underlines the complementarity between theory and experimentation as a characteristic feature of the Meinong-school. In particular, it deals with the nucleus of a theory of presentation implicit in the theory of production. In fact, on the basis of Benussi's experimental results, I distinguish between presentation and representation, relatively to the various phases of the moment-now as the qualitative primitive of cognition. This result has various consequences which shed light on the act-side: it shows that the production relation relates to the act and not to the produced object, clarifying some difficulties concerning the nature of ideal objects in Meinong's ontology; that the psychological act grantes the objects of knowing on the basis of cognitive determinants which are assimilative determinants and determinants of connection. These cognitive aspects of the act are indeed forms of completions of the known objects. Endly, the essay deals with the a-modal development of Benussi's theory of the cognitive aspects of the act as performed by the Italian Gestaltist Gaetano Kanizsa.

Die Intentionalität des Psychischen charakterisiert Meinong als Erfassen eines Gegenstandes durch das erfassende Erlebnis, wobei der erfaßte Gegenstand weder zu existieren noch zu bestehen braucht. Ein Gegenstand ist geradezu bestimmt als das, was erfaßt werden kann; der erfaßte Gegenstand ist aber nicht Teil des erfassenden Erlebnisses. Gleichsam als subjektives, psychisches Korrelat stellt Meinong dem erfaßten Gegenstand (Objekt, Objektiv etc.) den entsprechenden Erlebnisinhalt (Vorstellungsinhalt, Urteils- bzw. Annahmeinhalt etc.) gegenüber, der zu dem betreffenden Gegenstand in einer Adäquatheitsrelation steht. Ziel des Aufsatzes ist es, einige der Schwierigkeiten zu besprechen, die die Einführung von derartigen psychischen Inhalten mit sich bringen. M.E. gibt es keinen brauchbaren Anhaltspunkt, herauszufinden, wie die psychischen Inhalte ihre Aufgabe, auf die Gegenstände zu referieren, sie dem Erfassen darzubieten, zu erfüllen vermögen. Weitere schwerwiegende Probleme ergeben sich aus der Frage, welche Gegenstände hinweisendem Denken entsprechen und wie es gelingen kann, durch einen Hilfsgegenstand den Zielgegenstand zu erfassen.

The first half of the paper reflects on a couple of folk-psychological notions. "Belief and "judgement" are selected for special attention. They cover two varieties of thinking, a mental state and a mental act. Both lay claim to truth, and thereby stand in marked contrast to their nowadays sadly neglected non-committal counterparts. Meinong, of course, did not neglect them, and his notions of "Annehmen (merely entertaining a thought)" and "Denken (entertaining a thought)" play a decisive role in the paper. - The Lingua Mentis Hypothesis is a bold contribution to cognitive subpersonal psychology. The second half of the paper tries to show that careful reflection on the conceptuäl resources of folk psychology makes certain arguments for this Hypothesis as well as certain philosophical arguments against it look rather feeble. The paper culminates in a discussion of Jerry Fodor's Systematicity Argument for the Language of Thought Hypothesis. In this discussion critical use is made of certain Meinongian insights.