Alexius Meinong

Alexius Meinong von Handschuchsheim (1853 to 1920) was an Austrian philosopher who also built one of the first psychology laboratories in the German-speaking world. He studied at the University of Vienna and became a pupil of Franz Brentano, whose interest in the acts of the mind shaped his early work. From 1882 he taught at the University of Graz, where in 1894 he founded the Graz Psychological Institute and with it the Graz School of experimental psychology. He supervised the doctorates of several people who became important to psychology, among them Christian von Ehrenfels, the founder of Gestalt psychology, and Fritz Heider, the founder of attribution theory. He is best remembered in philosophy for the theory of objects, which asks how we can think about things such as a golden mountain that do not exist, and for contributions to the philosophy of mind and the theory of value.