Abstract

Alexius Meinong is best known for his theory of intended objects. At once an adjunct to a Brentanian phenomenological psychology, Meinong’s Gegenstandstheorie is also a system of metaphysics, an ontology and extraontology, and a philosophical semantics offered from the standpoint of an intentionalist philosophy of language. By requiring that every thought intend an existent, subsistent, or beingless object, Meinong infamously opens his extraontology to incomplete and impossible objects like the golden mountain and round square. Yet Meinong’s value theory or Werttheorie, built upon his object theory, is a vitally if not equally important part of his philosophy.