Russell’s Notes for “Meinong’s Theory of Complexes and Assumptions”

Abstract

This paper presents fifteen pages of notes and marginal comments from Russell’s study of Meinong’s Ueber Annahmen and two other works in preparation for his 1904 article “Meinong’s Theory of Complexes and Assumptions”. The notes include an early appearance of the argument for the existence of universals that Russell later used in Chapter 9 of The Problems of Philosophy. The main focus of the notes is on Meinong’s notion of “objective” and the contrast with Russell’s notion of proposition, with non-existents such as “the round square” barely mentioned.