Those who are – in the tradition of Meinong – willing to accept the claim that there are objects that do not exist usually argue that the ontological commitment to nonexistent objects allows to resolve a variety of problems of reference and intentionality, such as: the problem of singular negative existential statements, the problem of discourse on past and future objects, the problem of discourse on fictitious objects, the problem of counterfactual existentials, the problem of allegedly necessary truths on nonexistent (...) objects (e. g., "The round square is round".) It seems that the ontological commitment to nonexistent objects enables us to explain both the obvious truth of many predicative sentences whose subject terms do not denote anything existent and the possibility of intentional acts whose objects do not exist. The aim of this paper is to show that the commitment to nonexistents does not resolve any of these problems. Furthermore, some alternative solutions are delineated. (shrink)

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński.