A Common Ground and Some Surprising Connections *

There are various strategies one might follow in preparing and delivering a lecture of this kind. Since this conference is entitled Origins: The Common Sources of the Analytic and Phenomenological Traditions, I decided that the best approach would be to provide you with a kind of field guide to certain passages in the literature which bear upon the foundational theory of objects I have developed over the years. I hope this proves to be appropriate, for I believe that this foundational theory assimilates ideas from key philosophers in both the analytical and phenomenological traditions. Many of you will already know that the theory I’ve developed has its roots in the work of Alexius Meinong and Ernst Mally, and that it is grounded in a distinction between two kinds of predication. For those of you who don’t know the theory, let me say briefly that the theory postulates special abstract objects that encode the properties by which they are conceived and which constitute their nature. These abstract objects exemplify properties as well; indeed, they are complete with respect to the properties they exemplify, though they may be incomplete with respect to the properties they encode. Moreover, the theory asserts that ordinary objects stand in contrast to abstract objects in part by the fact that they only