Abstract
We learned at our mother"s knee of the philosophical extravagance of Alexius von Meinong (1853–1920), who believed that in addition to the objects which exist, e.g. tables and chairs, and those which (at best) subsist, e.g. (natural) numbers, geometrical objects and objectives,1 there "are" objects which do not have being of any kind despite having properties. This domain of beingless objects (called "Außersein") includes such things as the golden mountain and the round square, i.e. both possible and impossible objects. We were also told that Bertrand Russell, armed with a robust sense of reality, exorcised "the horrors of Meinong"s jungle" from philosophy. Russell"s essay "On Denoting" was perhaps Mum"s paradigm example of philosophical progress, and we were duly impressed. As Karel Lambert aptly remarks, "Graduate students from 1905 on have participated vicariously in Russell"s destruction of the Meinongian edifice, usually with the open glee of an architectural critic at contemplating the annihilation of Disneyland"([1983], p. 34n).