A Very Short Fact: Onthis day in 1920, Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong died. Meinong was knownf
A Very Short Fact: Onthis day in 1920, Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong died. Meinong was knownfor his unique ontology, which claimed that everything that the universecontains everything that can be thought (even contradictions!) even if thosethings don’t exist, but merely “subsist.”“Consider theproposition ‘the present king of France is wise’. This is perfectly meaningful,and because it is so it seems natural to ask whether it is true or false. Andto this there seems an equally natural answer. There is no king of France atpresent; the subject term fails to refer to anything. Therefore, it seems thatthe proposition should be considered false. But there is a problem here,concerning how to demonstrate why it is false. This is because if in normalcircumstances we say of something (call it ‘x’) that x is wise, the proposition‘x is wise’ will be true if x is wise, and false if x is not wise. But what ifthere is no x? How can we say of something that does not exist that it eitheris or is not wise?Initially Russell accepted a solution to this puzzle which hadbeen proposed by the nineteenth‐centuryphilosopher Alexius Meinong. This solution was to say that every expressionwith a referring or denoting function in a sentence does denote something, either an actuallyexisting item, as with the table in ‘the table is brown’, or a ‘subsisting’item, where by ‘subsistence’ is meant non‐actual existence – a kind of real but half or‘courtesy’ existence. On this view, the universe contains everything that canbe thought or talked about, including the present king of France; but only someof what the universe contains is actually existent. Accordingly the descriptivephrase ‘the present king of France’ does indeed denote, and what it denotes isa subsistent – that is a real but non‐actual – king of France.” — From ‘Wittgenstein:A Very Short Introduction’ by A.C. Grayling[Pg.23 — From ‘Wittgenstein:A Very Short Introduction’ by A.C. Grayling.]Image via Wikimedia Commons. -- source link
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