Meinong’s Life and Philosophy

Abstract

Biography of Meinong, emphasizing his studies with Brentano and the role of intentionality theory in Meinong’s thought as an offshoot of the Brentano school. The facts of Meinong’s life and education, academic advancement and scientific and philosophical contributions, are presented as background to the main principles of his philosophy. Meinong attempts to generalize the phenomenalist external existence-suspending attitude in favor of limiting philosophy to consideration of the contents of immediate sense perceptions. That is to say, independently of the question of whether impressions of the senses and their cognitive by-products accurately represent a world outside of thought. If there is a positive demonstration that this is so, after Descartes’s efforts, the empiricists gave up on anything more than God or the psychological compulsion to believe that there exists a physical spatiotemporal world ‘without the mind’. If every thought intends an object, then, as Meinong saw the train of consequences, if logic is to apply to the distinguishable contents and intended objects of thought, to Brentano’s enormous discomfiture, some thoughts ostensibly must intend such nonexistent objects as the golden mountain and round square. This offends against the Aristotelian strain in Brentano’s empiricism and touted ‘scientific’ philosophy. Meinong’s contributions to experimental psychology, establishing the first laboratory for its study in Austria at Graz, and his interests in value theory, including ethics and aesthetics, are noted as offering a foretaste of later chapters in the book. Meinong’s difficult relations with Brentano after launching object theory are considered as historical background to a more contemporary revisionary reconsideration of the merits and challenges of Meinong’s object theory.