Russell vs. Meinong

Nicholas Griffin is Director of the Bertrand Russell Centre at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy. He has written widely on Russell and is the general editor of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, the author of Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, and two volumes of Russell’s Selected Letters.Dale Jacquette is Senior Professorial Chair in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He has recently published Meinongian Logic: The Semantics of Existence and Nonexistence; Wittgenstein’s Thought in Transition; On Boole; Ontology; David Hume’s Critique of Infinity; and The Philosophy of Schopenhauer.

• Introduction: Russell and Meinong in Retrospect 1. Logic and Denotation Alasdair Urquhart 2. Antirealism and the Theory of Descriptions Graham Stevens 3. Russell vs. Frege on Definite Descriptions as Singular Terms Francis Jeffry Pelletier and Bernard Linsky 4. A Cantorian Argument Against Frege’s and Early Russell’s Theories of Descriptions Kevin C. Klement 5. ‘On Denoting’: Appearance and Reality Gideon Makin 6. Explaining G. F. Stout’s Reaction to Russell’s ‘On Denoting’ Omar W. Nasim 7. Russell on ‘the’ in the Plural David Bostock 8. Psychological Content and Indeterminacy with Respect to Being: Two Notes on the Russell-Meinong Debate Johann Christian Marek 9. Meditations on Meinong’s Golden Mountain Dale Jacquette 10. Rethinking Item Theory Nicholas Griffin 11. Contra Meinong Peter Loptson 12. Who is Afraid of Imaginary Objects? Gabriele Contessa 13. Russell’s Definite Descriptions de re Gregory C. Landini 14. Quantifying in and Anti-Essentialism Michael Nelson 15. Points, Complexes, Complex Points, and a Yacht Nathan Salmon

"In conclusion... the editors have produced a highly attractive, concise collection of essays which succeeds in bringing together a variety of perspectives concerning Russell's "On Denoting" and the Russell vs. Meinong debate. Each of the essays in this book is well-crafted and rich in useful insights on a number of theoretically interesting points." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews