Meinong the Phenomenologist

Abstract

My task on the present occasion resembles an achievement attributed to Ammonius Saccas, the teacher of Plotinus: he is alleged to have laid bare the homodoxy of Plato and Aristotle, the fact that, though Aristotle went pretty far from his base in Platonism, and had a deeply different direction of interest, he never went far enough not to be considered an alternative developer of the same philosophy, one which accepts εἴδη or Ideas, and their principles, as the supreme causative and explanatory principles both for being and for knowledge. My aim on this occasion is, in the same way, to expound the homodoxy of Meinong and Husserl, the philosophical identity, at a sufficiently deep level, of the school of Graz with its famous Gegenstandstheorie or Theory of Objects, which outdoes Ontology in its catholicity, together with its pendant Erfassungstheorie or Theory of Apprehension, and the school of Freiburg, with its yet more famous Phänomenologie or investigation of the necessary structures of subjectivity, together with the pendant Formal Ontology which investigates all the sorts of realities and irrealities constituted in and by such subjectivity. It is my purpose to contend that these two philosophers, and their entourages, were in the main, in so far as they deserve enduring attention, doing much the same philosophical work in much the same manner, and that their differences of outlook, as in the case of Plato and Aristotle, were such as to make their work truly complementary, two sides of a single investigation into the architecture and furniture of consciousness and the world.

A paper given at a meeting of the Society for Phenomenological Philosophy at New Orleans, October 27th, 1971. This paper is to appear in a forthcoming issue of the Revue Internationale de Philosophie, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the Revue.