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International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy

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168288

Objects and objectives, dignitatives and desideratives

meinong's objects of cognition and affect

Peter Simons

pp. 443-453

Abstract

Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) is one of the foremost, most independent-minded, most distinctive, most misunderstood and most unjustly maligned of all (and not just Austrian) philosophers. He was pilloried by his own teacher Brentano and his one-time admirer Bertrand Russell as what Gilbert Ryle called "perhaps the supreme entity-multiplier in the history of philosophy." It is often enough to employ the adjective "Meinongian' to cast a philosopher's views into the outer darkness. But as supreme commentator J. N. Findlay observes, Meinong was a painstakingly careful and methodical thinker, who inched his way forward to his radical ontological views. Meinong maintained a running interest in ethics and value theory, and the subjective experiences of feeling and desire that correlate to these spheres, from his 1894 Psychological-ethical investigations in value theory to his late works Emotional presentation (Meinong in Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Philosophisch-historische Klasse. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1917) and the posthumous On the foundation of general value theory (1923). In the process he graduated from value subjectivism to value objectivism. In this paper we will survey Meinong's mature theory of intentionality and its objects, with particular attention to the otherwise neglected dignitatives and desideratives.

Publication details

Published in:

(2017) Axiomathes 27 (5).

Pages: 443-453

DOI: 10.1007/s10516-017-9346-2

Full citation:

Simons Peter (2017) „Objects and objectives, dignitatives and desideratives: meinong's objects of cognition and affect“. Axiomathes 27 (5), 443–453.