{"id":10659,"date":"2011-06-02T16:58:57","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T16:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/06\/02\/does-meinong-multiply-entities-beyond-necessity\/"},"modified":"2011-06-02T16:58:57","modified_gmt":"2011-06-02T16:58:57","slug":"does-meinong-multiply-entities-beyond-necessity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/06\/02\/does-meinong-multiply-entities-beyond-necessity\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Meinong Multiply Entities Beyond Necessity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a very good and a very simple reason why Meinong cannot be accused of multiplying entities <\/span> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

The golden mountain and the round square, to take the two most celebrated, neither exist, nor subsist, nor have any mode of being whatsoever. This is a point that is often missed. Misled by Russell, many think that Meinong's possibilia and impossibilia have a mode of being weaker than existence. Not so: his objects are jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein<\/em>, beyond being and nonbeing. They are ausserseiend<\/em>,   outside of being. Indeed, he speaks of das Aussersein des reinen Gegenstandes<\/em>. The phrase is hard to translate, but "the extrabeing of the pure object" approximates to its sense. The point is that an   object like the golden mountain is a pure Sosein<\/em>: its Sein<\/em> is exhausted by its Sosein<\/em>, its being by its being-so. It is a pure what, a pure essence wihout being.<\/span><\/p>\n

I reject Meinong's Theory of Objects for reasons I may provide later.  My present point is merely that the theory cannot be faulted for a lack of ontological parsimony. A theory cannot posit entities beyond <\/span>necessity if it does not posit them at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his early Principles of Mathematics <\/em>(1903), Bertrand Russell made a distinction that he later abandoned, namely, a distinction between Being and existence:<\/span><\/p>\n

     Being is that which belongs to every conceivable term, to every<\/span>
     possible object of thought — in short to everything that can<\/span>
     possibly occur in any proposition, true or false, and to all such<\/span>
     propositions themselves. [ . . . ] Existence, on the contrary, is<\/span>
     the prerogative of some only amongst beings. (p. 449)<\/span><\/p>\n

But this has nothing to do with Meinong and should not be read back into Meinong. Now Meinong does distinguish between existence and subsistence (Bestehen<\/em>), but the latter is the mode of Being of ideal <\/span>entities such as state of affairs; it has nothing to do with items like the golden mountain and the round square.<\/span>
 <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Does Meinong Multiply Entities Beyond Necessity?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[482],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meinong-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}