{"title":"Homeless Objects","authors":"Guillaume Fréchette","doi":"10.1163/18756735-00000184","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nIn this article, I shed some light on Meinong’s motivations for the theory of objects. I argue that one of its basic principles, the principle of indifference, is driven by an intuition common to many Austrian philosophers, which is that something must first be somehow pre-given in order to simply address the issue of its being or non-being. Meinong’s way of spelling out this intuition, I suggest, is to show that there are homeless objects, that is, objects that are not dealt with by any of the existing sciences. Therefore, the indispensability of the theory of objects lies in the plausibility of the thesis that there are such homeless objects. I analyse and evaluate two Meinongian arguments supporting this thesis, I explain how Meinong came to believe that they support the indispensability of the theory of objects, and I stress some advantages of this account over Brentano’s intentionality thesis.","PeriodicalId":43873,"journal":{"name":"Grazer Philosophische Studien-International Journal for Analytic Philosophy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Grazer Philosophische Studien-International Journal for Analytic Philosophy","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18756735-00000184","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"PHILOSOPHY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
In this article, I shed some light on Meinong’s motivations for the theory of objects. I argue that one of its basic principles, the principle of indifference, is driven by an intuition common to many Austrian philosophers, which is that something must first be somehow pre-given in order to simply address the issue of its being or non-being. Meinong’s way of spelling out this intuition, I suggest, is to show that there are homeless objects, that is, objects that are not dealt with by any of the existing sciences. Therefore, the indispensability of the theory of objects lies in the plausibility of the thesis that there are such homeless objects. I analyse and evaluate two Meinongian arguments supporting this thesis, I explain how Meinong came to believe that they support the indispensability of the theory of objects, and I stress some advantages of this account over Brentano’s intentionality thesis.