. Literally, what ‘lies before’ something. Anything which has independent existence (qualities, etc. have dependent existence); or, and perhaps more commonly in philosophy, what a change is instigated to produce, or a mental attitude is ‘directed at’ (see INTENSIONALITY AND INTENTIONALITY on ‘intentional objects’). Cf. ‘the object in my pocket’, ‘the object of my ambition’. These meanings are often intermingled. Kenny distinguishes what is perhaps a third sense: the object of an action is that which is changed by the action. (He spells ‘intentional’ with an ‘s’.) Meinong distinguished the object of an act like thinking from its content, but insisted that the object had something called ‘BEING so’. Frege treated objects as whatever can be named, and contrasted them with CONCEPTS. In this wide sense ‘object’ approximates to ‘thing’, though usually, when the ‘independent existence’ meaning is dominant, objects are limited to particulars (see UNIVERSALS).
In the case of emotions, etc. the object may be hard to distinguish from the cause.
A.Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, RKP, 1963. (See index.)
A.Meinong, ‘The theory of objects’ in R.Chisholm (ed.), Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, Free Press, 1960 (trans. from German original of 1904). (A famous and influential, though controversial, theory.)
J.A.Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, Duckworth, 1957, revised and expanded, 1966. (See index esp. pp. 176–87 (173–85 in Penguin edn) for Brentano and Meinong on objects.)
J.J.Valberg, ‘The puzzle of experience’ in T.Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience, Cambridge UP, 1992, esp. §4 (reprinted from Valberg’s The Puzzle of Experience, Oxford UP, 1992.
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