This book explores the thought of Alexius Meinong, a philosopher known for his unconventional theory of reference and predication. The chapters cover a natural progression of topics, beginning with the origins of Gegenstandstheorie, Meinong’s theory of objects, and his discovery of assumptions as a fourth category of mental states to supplement his teacher Franz Brentano’s references to presentations, feelings, and judgments. The chapters explore further the meaning and metaphysics of fictional and other nonexistent intended objects, fine points in Meinongian object theory are considered and new and previously unanticipated problems are addressed. The author traces being and non-being and aspects of beingless objects including objects in fiction, ideal objects in scientific theory, objects ostensibly referred to in false science and false history and intentional imaginative projection of future states of affairs. The chapters focus on an essential choice of conceptual, logical, semantic, ontic and more generally metaphysical problems and an argument is progressively developed from the first to the final chapter, as key ideas are introduced and refined. Meinong studies have come a long way from Bertrand Russell’s off-target criticisms and recent times have seen a rise of interest in a Meinongian approach to logic and the theory of meaning. New thinkers see Meinong as a bridge figure between analytic and continental thought, thanks to the need for an adequate semantics of meaning in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, making this book a particularly timely publication.​

This book explores the thought of Alexius Meinong, a philosopher known for his unconventional theory of reference and predication. The chapters cover a natural progression of topics, beginning with the origins of Gegenstandstheorie, Meinong's theory of objects, and his discovery of assumptions as a fourth category of mental states to supplement his teacher Franz Brentano's references to presentations, feelings, and judgments. The chapters explore further the meaning and metaphysics of fictional and other nonexistent intended objects, fine points in Meinongian object theory are considered and new and previously unanticipated problems are addressed. The author traces being and non-being, and aspects of beingless objects including objects in fiction, ideal objects in scientific theory, objects ostensibly referred to in false science and false history, and intentional imaginative projection of future states of affairs. The chapters focus on an essential choice of conceptual, logical, semantic, ontic and more generally metaphysical problems, and an argument is progressively developed from the first to the final chapter, as key ideas are introduced and refined. Meinong studies have come a long way from Bertrand Russell's off-target criticisms, and recent times have seen a rise of interest in a Meinongian approach to logic and the theory of meaning. New thinkers see Meinong as a bridge figure between analytic and continental thought, thanks to the need for an adequate semantics of meaning in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, making this book a particularly timely publication.

This volume addresses key aspects of the philosophical psychology elaborated by Alexius Meinong and some of his students. It covers a wide range of topics, from the place of psychological investigations in Meinong’s unique philosophical program to his thought-provoking views on perception, colors, “Vorstellungsproduktion,” assumptions, values, truth, and emotions.

The combination of current cosmology, physical theories, ancient cosmogonies, theologies, and metaphysics poses three main questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does being take many forms? What is the origin of everything? Many different answers have been given in various different fields to these questions. In theological, creationist metaphysics, the only answer is the existence of a creator who has given rise not only to everything, but also to the laws that govern existence. Non-theological metaphysics, instead, has engaged in the determination of some first principles (archái), from which derives the reality in its various forms. Science, for a long time, evaded these questions, focusing instead on particular aspects of reality by formulating explanations of natural phenomena. In the course of their current development, physics (including quantum theory) and cosmology have posed questions concerning the origin of the whole universe and the reasons for its existence. They believe it is possible to formulate a theory of everything, just as metaphysical cosmologists and theologians thought. The papers collected in this volume offer interesting contributions to the debates surrounding this ultimate “why” question.

This second volume continues Richard Routley’s explorations of an improved Meinongian account of non-referring and intensional discourse (including joint work with Val Routley, later Val Plumwood). It focuses on the essays 2 through 7 of the original monograph, Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond, following on from the material of the first volume and explores its implications of the Noneist position. It begins with a further development of noneism in the direction of an ontologically neutral chronological logic and associated metaphysical issues concerning existence and change. What follows includes: a detailed response to Quine’s On What There Is; a defense against further objections to noneism; a detailed account of Meinong’s own position; arguments in favour of noneism from common-sense; and a noneist analysis of fictional discourse. We present these essays separately and provide additional scholarly commentaries from a range of philosophers including Fred Kroon, Maria Elisabeth Reicher-Marek and a previously unpublished commentary on noneism by J.J.C. Smart.

This book offers a clear, analytic, and innovative interpretation of Heidegger’s late work. This period of Heidegger’s philosophy remains largely unexplored by analytic philosophers, who consider it filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical ideas, particularly concerning the notions of Being and nothingness. This book takes seriously the claim that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism – namely the position according to which some contradictions are true – and shows that the idea that Being is both an entity and not an entity is neither incoherent nor logically trivial. The author achieves this by presenting and defending the idea that reality has an inconsistent structure. In doing so, he takes one of the most discussed topics in current analytic metaphysics, grounding theory, into a completely unexplored area. Additionally, in order to make sense of Heidegger’s concept of nothingness, the author introduces an original axiomatic mereological system that, having a paraconsistent logic as a base logic, can tolerate inconsistencies without falling into logical triviality. This is the first book to set forth a complete and detailed discussion of the late Heidegger in the framework of analytic metaphysics. It will be of interest to Heidegger scholars and analytic philosophers working on theories of grounding, mereology, dialetheism, and paraconsistent logic.

Are there nonexistent objects? Can we make sense of objects having properties without thinking that there are nonexistent objects? Is existence a predicate? Can we make sense of necessarily existing objects depending on God? Tackling these central questions, Matthew Davidson explores the metaphysics of existence and nonexistence. He presents an extended argument for independence actualism, a previously undefended view that objects can have properties in worlds and at times at which they do not exist. Among other unique points of discussion, Davidson considers the nature of actualism, arguments for and against serious actualism, the semantics of “exists” as a predicate, the merits of different sorts of Meinongian theories, and different views on which God might ground the existence of necessarily existing abstracta. The book offers a Lewisian-style argument for adopting independence actualism in that the view may be used to solve many problems in metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of religion.