ABSTRACT
Various considerations prompted the idea of undertaking this historical and conceptual reconstruction of the theories developed in Graz at the turn of the nineteenth century by a group of philosophers and experimental psychologists led by Alexius Meinong. The Manifesto of the Vienna Circle in 1929 lists Brentano, Meinong and Alois Hofler as thinkers with interests akin to its own, which is a testimonial to the importance of their theories for philosophy at the time, and for Austrian philosophy especially. Meinong constructed a sophisticated ontology intended to be a theory of every kind of entity. B. Russell's theory of definite descriptions in 'On Denoting' nonetheless raised a new paradigm of analytic philosophy. The fact that he took the occasion to criticize Meinong's object theory had a profound negative impact on the reception of Meinong's ideas, especially in the Anglo-American philosophical community. The 'jungle' of objects that populate Meinong's ontology, and which so bewildered Russell, therefore arose from these premises.
