. 1853–1920. Austrian, born in Lemberg (Lwow), he worked mainly in Graz. He developed BRENTANO’S view by insisting on a distinction between the content and the object (‘Gegenstand’) of a thought, and his philosophy largely concerns the various kinds of such objects. These include chairs and tables, which exist, ‘objectives’ like the being of chairs, which are always positive or negative, higher-order objects like the difference between red and green, which merely subsist, dragons and the golden mountain and the round square, which neither exist nor subsist but still have ‘Sosein’ (‘being so’). Objects which were not objectives he called ‘Objekta’. He also supplemented Brentano’s distinction between ideas and judgments by introducing ‘supposals’ or ‘assumptions’ (‘Annahmen’), and he elaborated a theory of value. ‘Zur erkenntnistheoretischen Würdigung des Gedächtnisses’, Vierteljahrschrift für Wissenschaftliche Philosophie, x, 1886.
‘Über Bedeutung des Weber’schen Gesetzes’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie and Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, XI, 1896. Über Annahmen, 1902 (importantly revised in 1910, and translated as On Assumptions, California UP, 1983). ‘Über Gegenstandstheorie’, in A.Meinong (ed.), Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie, 1904 (translated as ‘On the theory of objects’ in R.Chisholm (ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, Free Press, 1960). Über Möglichkeit and Wahrscheinlichkeit, 1915. Über emotionale Präsentation, 1917 (translated as On Emotional Presentation, Northwestern UP, 1972). Zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Werttheorie, 1923. See also BEING, OBJECT, REFERRING.
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