Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Meinong Matters

  • Begging the Question Against Meinong

    For Meinong, some objects neither exist nor subsist: they have no being at all.  See Kripke's Misrepresentation of Meinong. London Ed finds Meinong's characteristic thesis contradictory. "The claim that some objects neither exist nor subsist is an existential claim, of course, so how can 'they' have no being?" I say that Ed begs the question…

  • Beingless Objects

    For Meinong, some objects neither exist nor subsist: they have no being at all.  The stock examples are the golden mountain and the round square. London Ed finds this contradictory. "The claim that some objects neither exist nor subsist is an existential claim, of course, so how can 'they' have no being?" But of course…

  • Kripke’s Misrepresentation of Meinong

    In "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities" (in Philosophical Troubles, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 52-74) Saul Kripke distances himself from the following view that he ascribes to Alexius Meinong: Many people have gotten confused about these matters because they have said, 'Surely there are fictional characters who fictionally do such-and-such things; but fictional characters don't exist;…

  • A Cartesian Argument Against Meinong

    The following is excerpted from my "Does Existence Itself Exist? Transcendental Nihilism Meets the Paradigm Theory" in The Philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov: A Collegial Evaluation, ed. Larry Lee Blackman, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, pp. 57-73, excerpt pp. 67-68. If anything can count as an established result in philosophy, it is the soundness of Descartes'…

  • The Existent Round Square

    One of Russell's objections to Meinong was that the denizens of Aussersein, i.e., beingless objects, are apt to infringe the Law of Non-Contradiction.  Suppose a Meinongian subscribes to the following principle: Unrestricted Satisfaction (US):  Every definite description is such that some object  satisfies it.  For any definite description we can concoct, there is a corresponding…

  • Some Notes on Rescher’s “Nonexistents Then and Now”

    A reader inquires: Have you read Nicholas Rescher's Nonexistents Then and Now? I read it recently and thought I'd bring it to your attention because it's relevant to your recent posts on fiction. If I understand the article, Rescher would agree with you that a fictional man is not a man, but he would say…

  • Word of the Day: Depauperate

    I stumbled across this word on p. 539 of the heaviest, fattest, stompingest tome in my library, Richard Routley's Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond (Ridgeview, 1980).  The thing is 1,035 pages long.  I could kill a cat with it, and you hope I won't.  A mere $500 for an Amazon used copy. One copy available…

  • More on Ficta and Impossibilia

    As an ornery aporetician, I want ultimately to say that an equally strong case can be made both for and against the thesis that ficta are impossibilia.  But here I only make (part of) the case for thinking that ficta are impossibilia. Preliminaries Every human being is either right-handed or not right-handed.  (But if one…

  • More on the Status of Thomistic Common Natures

    This is proving to be a fascinating topic.  Let's push on a bit further. Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either mode of…

  • Gyula Klima on Thomistic Common Natures: Some Questions

    In his SEP article, The Medieval Problem of Universals, Gyula Klima offers the following explanation of the Thomistic doctrine of common natures: So, a common nature or essence according to its absolute consideration abstracts from all existence, both in the singulars and in the mind. Yet, and this is the important point, it is the…

  • Is Meinong’s Theory of Objects “Obviously Self-Contradictory?” Van Inwagen Says ‘Yes’

    A good post from November aught-nine.  Highly relevant to current discussions.

  • George F. Will and the Beach Boys Meet Alexius Meinong

    "The Beach Boys Still Get Around." Excellent sociocultural analysis by George Will.  Opening paragraph: Three hours before showtime, Brian Wilson says: “There is no Rhonda.” Sitting backstage at Merriweather Post Pavilion, gathering strength for the evening’s 48-song, 150-minute concert, Wilson was not asked about her, he just volunteered this fact. The other members of the…

  • Does Meinong Multiply Entities Beyond Necessity?

    There is a very good and a very simple reason why Meinong cannot be accused of multiplying entities  beyond necessity, and that is because his characteristic objects are not entities! An entity, by definition, is anything that is or has being. Since Meinongian objects lack being, they are not entities. The golden mountain and the…

  • Blackman Versus Butchvarov: Objects, Entities, and Modes of Existence

    (UPDATE: 23 March.  Butchvarov sent me some comments via e-mail the main ones of  which I insert in the text in red.) This post assumes familiarity with Panayot Butchvarov's "protometaphysics," as he calls it.  But I will begin by sketching the distinction between objects and entities.  Then I will present an objection that occurred to…

  • Existence and Completeness

    Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662: . . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds.  The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark…