Abstract

Meinong justifies the need of his Gegenstandstheorie by presenting it as a generalization of (existing) metaphysics, in that the former deals with both existent and non-existent objects, whereas the latter used to deal with existent objects only. But this justification is disingenuous, since the notion of a non-existent object is virtually a contradiction in terms for the traditional paradigm. What Meinong is really proposing is a conceptual revolution of a Kantian variety, and we need to get clearer about the full import of this revolution. This is what the present paper attempts to do.