Talk:Alexius Meinong

Expansion Needed
This article needs some serious expanding, his views are far wider reaching than the article suggests, the Object theory was part of Meinong's very deep world view. Also, a very convinceing arguement can be made against Russell's "death blow" as he miss-understood the distinction between existence and subsistence complety. Such a project is a bit ambitious for me though, as I'm not all that familiar with editing Wikipedia. 81.129.82.108 18:47, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Just as a beginning, I translated some basic definitions from it:wiki to clarify existence, subsistence etc.. Hope this helps. There's a lot more to be said indeed. Cat 23:14, 10 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Thats a great start, but I'm wondering (from my basic understanding) if possible objects are also included with the "third" type of objects? From Findlay's book (and several papers I read), I was under the impression that objects that might exist are included with the impossible and mythical objects of the third kind.


 * I'm just a 2nd year philosophy student, and I've only written a single essay on Meinong from the angle of philosophy of language and the Referential Theory of meaning (argueing that Meinong allows us to resist the Puzzles of Reference, especially the Negative Existentials problem); his theories caught my interest, but I've had difficulty getting to grips with them, which is why I'm asking rather than editing. 81.157.152.11 23:53, 27 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually responding to Russell requires making sense of "das Modalmoment" which nobody has done yet, although A.K. Jorgensen comes close in "Meinong's Much-Maligned Modal Moment" in the Graz phil journal. At any rate, if you actually read the paragraph in which I mentioned the "death blow", the implication that the historical treatment is wrong is obvious. It seems to me further work needs to be published before an explanation of how Russell misses the point is wiki-ready. ForgeGod (talk) 21:26, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Meinong recognizes four classes of objects. The first are objects that exist and have being, such as people, elephants, telephones, etc. The second are objects that do not exist but rather subsist and still have being, like numbers, relations, etc. The third are objects that exist but do NOT have being, such as a gold mountain, Sherlock Holmes, unicorns, etc. -- things that could be but aren't. The fourth -- and this is the source of much controversy in the discussion of Meinong's work -- are objects that do not exist nor have being, such as squared circles. I might take to editing this using the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a source, since a good portion of this is absolutely dead wrong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by MDOndrick (talk • contribs) 19:43, 14 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I wrote much of the original article, but some very misleading things have been added. The extent of my interest is in his theory of objects, so someone else will have to address the other areas. However, I'm going to correct some of the material that was added since my initial contribution. In particular, absistence is completely misunderstood if it is taken to be a minimal mode of being, as it is not a mode of BEING at all. As far as I know from his Ueber Annahmen and his articles, he does not make a basic distinction between your third and fourth categories, although we could make such a distinction if we wished. ForgeGod (talk) 21:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Meinong's article, Über Gegenstandstheorie, The Theory of Objects is available in. It is translated by Roderick M. Chisholm and is taken from a book edited by Chisholm titled Realism and the Background of Phenomenology (Free Press 1960). The debate between Russell and Meinong lasted for good part of the first two decades of 20th century. For example Janet Farrell Smith's article The Russell-Meinong Debate (1985) tries to shed some light as of what was the main line of thought as well as main differences between the standpoints of Russell and Meinong. And finally to be nitpicky, I'd say that in German Objective is written with "k", i.e. Objektiv not Objectiv. Also might be well worth to clarify that Gegenstand (Object) actually contains object and objective, a problem that is terminologically rather unsurmountable in English although the distinction in German seems to be rather self-evident. --78.27.82.90 (talk) 15:30, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

The term "Absistence"
I've attributed the use of this term in translating Meinong's notion of being-given to Findlay, but I can't remember if it's actually from his book, or from the translation of On Assumptions by Heanue. I'm too lazy to check, so I'll shuffle this to the Wiki community. ForgeGod (talk) 21:23, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I would love to know where "absistence" appears in relation to Meinong... I've been looking everywhere but can only find this Wikipedia page! For selfish reasons, but I think it could be useful for others too! 194.94.134.245 (talk) 15:02, 22 March 2019 (UTC)ErnstMally

This business about whether existence is a property
As it's now written, there's a paragraph full of equivocating between existence and being, arguing that Meinong didn't think existence is a property. Be that as it may, the equivocation really needs to be taken care of in light of Meinong's distinction between existence and being. 82.139.115.86 (talk) 15:41, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

-The paragraph cited above seems a muddle to me as well. My own tentative view of Meinong here is that he thought existence a property (or in terms of the Kantian problematic, a predicate) had by some objects--the actual ones. Objects' indifference to being--another topic with similar structure--in no way implies that no objects have it. Experts please clarify; in the meanwhile I'll go back to the sources myself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.41.12.180 (talk) 21:17, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I have no idea if I wrote that paragraph or not, but here's an attempt at making what is written there make sense: objects have their properties whether they subsist (have being) or not. But everything that exists must also subsist, since to exist is not only to have being (i.e., to subsist) but further to have (something like) temporal being. So if an object can fail to subsist and still have all of its properties, existence must not be a property. Granted, this supports the claim that Meinong does not take existence to be a property by construing the principle of the independence of Sosein from Sein to apply to all properties whatsoever, and that would have to be supported by finding in Meinong a statement explicitly about all properties whatsoever to that effect. I don't know if there is one, but that's how I read that paragraph, a few years removed from the primary sources though I am. 98.209.3.149 (talk) 21:17, 28 July 2011 (UTC)