Meinong and Husserl on Abstraction and Universals

Book excerpt: The influence of Franz Brentano in twentieth century philosophy has been extensive. His two most famous and outstanding pupils were Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl. These two are closely related not only regarding their common background in the school of Brentano, but also in their common concern with problems arising from British empiricism. Such a problem is to be found in the nominalist views of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume and their concomitant theories of general ideas. While Meinong's early work continues in the empiricist tradition by characterizing general ideas in terms of abstraction and not in terms of general objects (universals) as their correlates, Husserl's Logical Investigations are committed to the claim that general ideas can be described only as ideas which refer to general objects. In Meinong and Husserl on Abstraction and Universals the epistemological, psychological, and ontological aspects of these theories are examined and compared. Included is also a translation of Abstraction and Comparing (1900) by Meinong.