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M ichelle M ontague is to be an object of a mental act, namely something that typically exists beyond the mental act itself Twardowski is abandoning Brentano’s restriction to theorizing only about phenomena With this development, Twardowski can easily solve the puzzle for Brentano’s theory of judgment There is a mental content (immanent object), through which the aether is presented and judged as non-existing That content, present in me, exists The object of my judgment, the aether itself, does not exist The example of the aether has further significance, because although Twardowski’s distinction between content and object clarifies certain aspects of Brentano’s overall theory of intentionality, and even foreshadows our contemporary way of thinking about intentionality, it leaves a very difficult issue unresolved Twardowski and Meinong never forsook the idea that every mental phenomenon has an object, in addition to having a content If every mental phenomenon is object directed, in the sense of object introduced by Twardowski, then what we say about our thoughts about objects that don’t exist, such as thinking of the aether or the golden mountain? It is this consideration, together with the question of how to analyze negative existentials and the ontological status of mathematical entities, that motivated Meinong’s theory of objects Meinong summarized his own approach to the theory of objects as follows: It may sound strange to hear that metaphysics is not universal enough for a science of Objects, and hence cannot take on the task just formulated. Without doubt, metaphysics has to with everything that exists However, the totality of what exists, including what has existed and will exist, is infinitely small in comparison with the totality of the Objects of knowledge.25 According to Meinong, concrete objects, if they exist, exist in space and time Abstract objects, such as propositions or mathematical entities ‘subsist’ outside of space and time, and objects such as the golden mountain or Pegasus neither exist nor ‘subsist’; they are ‘beyond being or non-being’ This last category of objects, non-existent objects, has been the most controversial, despite its accounting for our seeming ability to think about non-existent objects and our ability to meaningful deny their existence What is critical for understanding this aspect of Meinong’s theory is the independence of an object’s Sosein (what an object is, what properties it has) from its Sein (existence) The Sosein of an Object is not affected by its Nichtsein . . neither being nor non-being can belong essentially to the Object in itself . . the Object as such stands ‘beyond being and non-being’ . . The Object is by nature indifferent to being, although at least one of its two Objectives of being, the Object’s being or non-being, subsists.26 There has been a lot of discussion and criticism of Meinong’s theory of objects.27 My goal here is not to discuss Meinong’s approach in detail, but to show how his 212
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