Philosophy of Meaning, Knowledge and Value in the Twentieth Century

While I was reading this book it occurred to me that the Austrian phenomenologist Alexius von Meinong (1853‐1920) has played an important part in English‐language philosophy in the twentieth‐century. At the end of the last century he appears to have influenced the young Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore in their abandonment of their early Hegelian idealism and revival of realism. The doctrine for which Meinong became best known in Anglo‐American philosophical circles holds that any “object of cognition” has a describable “nature” independent of whether or not an object happens to exist (Pegasus is a horse with wings, although he...