Alexius Meinong
Austrian philosopher and psychologist
born July 17, 1853, Lemberg, Galicia, Austrian Empire
[now Lviv, Ukraine]
died Nov. 27, 1920, Graz, Austria
Main
Austrian philosopher and psychologist remembered for his
contributions to axiology, or theory of values, and for his
Gegenstandstheorie, or theory of objects.
After studying under the philosophical psychologist Franz
Brentano from 1875 to 1878 in Vienna, he joined the faculty
of philosophy at the University of Graz, where he remained
as a professor from 1889 until his death. With Brentano he
helped promote the Austrian school of values but eventually
dissented from Brentano’s views on epistemology.
In his major work, Über Annahmen (1902; “On
Assumptions”), Meinong discussed the assumptions men make in
believing they know or do not know a particular truth. Like
Brentano, Meinong considered intentionality, or the
direction of attention to objects, to be the basic feature
of mental states. Yet he drew his own distinction between
two elements in every experience of the objective world:
“content,” which differentiates one object from another, and
“act,” by which the experience approaches its object.
Anticipating the work of the Phenomenologists, Meinong
maintained that objects remain objects and have a definite
character and definite properties (Sosein) even if they have
no being (Sein). Thus, “golden mountain” is an object
existing as a concept, even though no golden mountains exist
in the world of sense experience. Bertrand Russell was among
those influenced by this aspect of Meinong’s thought. Like
every other type of object knowable by different mental
states, values could also be classified as objects existing
independently of the experience of values and of the world
of sense experience. Two examples of value feeling are
Seinsfreude, the experience of joy in the existence of a
particular object, and Seinsleid, the experience of sadness
at the object’s existence.
Meinong’s Gegenstandstheorie is discussed in his
Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 2 vol. (1913–14; “Collected
Treatises”), and in John N. Findlay, Meinong’s Theory of
Objects (1933). His other important writings include Über
Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit (1915; “On Possibility
and Probability”) and Über emotionale Präsentation (1917).
