INGARDEN vs. MEINONG ON THE LOGIC OF FICTION

At the tum of the present century one problem, the so-called problem of the existence of the world, lay at the center of philosophical argument. The dominance of those who took the idealist side in this dispute, both in Germany and in England, was then rapidly being brought to an end with the works of Brentano, Meinong, Frege, Moore, and Russell, all of whom can be seen as having expressed, in their different ways, reactions against one or other form of Hegelian idealism. Yet this problem is no longer among the vital concerns of present-day philosophers. This is not because the realists have simply won the battle, such that the whole idealist phase in the history of philosophy from Kant to Bradley could justifiably be discounted as an unfortunate detour from the high road of Aristotle and the Scholastics, Leibniz, Frege, and 20th century realism. But certai_nly it is true that philosophers no longer pose any direct question concerning the (mode of) existence of the real world. One might perhaps say that a form of empiri"cal realism has come to be taken for granted on all sides, whether or not this. is regarded as consistent with some kind of idealist position on a higher ("transcendental") plain. We might expect, therefore, that there is little of value to current philosophy to be found in a work1 devoted to this issue, devoted, indeed, to the painstaking establishment of the validity of the realist position through some fifteen hundred pages of argument. The work in question was written by a Polish phenomenologist and student of Husserl, Roman Ingarden -at a time when the idealism-realism dispute had already ceased to occupy the attentions of those philosophers now recognized as the forbears of the analytic movement as part .of Ingarden's response to his teacher's move away from the realisf!l of the early Logical lnvesti"gatz'ons to the transcendental