Notes and Correspondence for Russell’s 1905 Review of Meinong

Abstract

Bertrand Russell took fourteen pages of notes on Meinong’s Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie [Studies in object theory and psychology] in preparation for his review of the book in Mind. Translations of Russell’s letters from Alexius Meinong, Rudolf Ameseder and Ernst Mally discuss their contributions to the volume (with transcriptions of the German originals appended in this journal’s online edition). Together the notes and correspondence record the origin of Russell’s famous criticisms of Mein­ong’s theory of non-existent objects, which appeared in both “On Denoting” and the review in Mind in October 1905.