Meinongian Dark Ages and Renaissance

Abstract

Meinong’s object theory has been the subject of neglect and ridicule ever since Russell, Ryle and others criticized the logic and predicational semantics of existent and nonexistent objects as internally inconsistent. The fact that these objections were misinformed and fully answerable does not imply that the perpetrators did not accomplish lots of mischief with respect to Meinong’s cause, that they never corrected their opinion or appreciated the need to do so, or that the satisfying answers that should have been given were actually formulated in a timely fashion and taken to heart by any of the dialectical participants in the discussions about nonexistents taking place at the time. The inconsistency objection is examined and answered as mistaken, and efforts are made to redress the historical imbalance and injustice in the standard reception of Meinong’s philosophy in the analytic philosophical community. The question of what it means to be a Meinongian intensionalist logician or semantic philosopher with analytic training, interests and leaning, as opposed to a Fregean-Russellian referentially extensionalist philosopher secure is considered as directions for the future course of Meinongian object theory are projected. The prospects for existence-neutral Meinongian intensionalist logic and semantics to flourish in countless preferred applications in the future are bright and encouraging.