Phenomenological Reviews

Series | Book | Chapter

182291

Meinong's concept of implexive being and non-being

Dale Jacquette

pp. 163-191

Abstract

Meinong introduces the concept of implexive being and non-being to explain the metaphysics of universals, and as a contribution to the theory of reference and perception. Meinong accounts for Aristotle's doctrine of the inherence of secondary substances in primary substances in object theory terms as the implection of incomplete universals in complete existent or subsistent entities. The derivative notion of implexive so-being is developed by Meinong to advance an intuitive modal semantics that admits degrees of possibility. A set theoretical interpretation of Meinong's mereological concept of the implection of incomplete beingless objects in existent or subsistent complete objects is proposed. The implications of Meinong's concept of implection are then exploited to answer extensionalist objections about "Meinong's jungle', defending the ontic economy of an extraontological neo-Meinongian semantic domain that supports individual reference and true predication of constitutive properties to beingless objects. Meinong's distinction between implexive being and non-being makes it possible to refute the popular but mistaken criticism that Meinongian semantics is ontically inflationary by showing that a revisionary object theory in addition to an ontology of actually existent particulars need at most posit in its extraontology a single maximally impossible object in which all other beingless objects are properly implected.

Publication details

Published in:

Jacquette Dale (2015) Alexius Meinong, the shepherd of non-being. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 163-191

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-18075-5_8

Full citation:

Jacquette Dale (2015) Meinong's concept of implexive being and non-being, In: Alexius Meinong, the shepherd of non-being, Dordrecht, Springer, 163–191.