Abstract

"An ontology may be described as consisting of three kinds of statements: those that set the problems; those that list the kinds of entities that exist; those that show how the existents solve the problems. Ontologies may thus differ in different ways. The most decisive way concerns the kinds of entities deemed to exist. With respect to this way, there are but two types of ontology. One is lavish, cluttered; the other, frugal, sparse. The ontologies of Plato, Meinong, and Frege are lavish; those of Hume, Brentano, and Wittgenstein are frugal. Gustav Bergmann has propounded both types of ontology in the course of his thirty years of philosophizing. The Bergmann of The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism (1954) and Meaning and Existence (1959) propounds a frugal ontology. The Bergmann of Logic and Reality (1964) and Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong (1967) propounds a lavish ontology. In a way of speaking that Bergmann himself has used, the world of the early Bergmann is a desert, the world of the later Bergmann a jungle. In a way of speaking that is suggestive, speculative, had the early Bergmann written Realism, he would have dedicated it to Brentano rather than to Meinong, as did the..