In his book Realism, dedicated to the “The Glorious Memory of Alexius Meinong” and devoted to complexity, Gustav Bergmann claims that in Meinong’s ontology there are no complexes. Bergmann judges Meinong’s solution of the ontological problem of complexity, a problem he considers pivotal, to have failed. How can he, nevertheless, praise Meinong, which he does not only in the dedication? This is because Bergmann thinks that Meinong comes very close to the right ontological analysis of complexes which was a rare (...) achievement in his time. (shrink)

In his book Realism, dedicated to the “The Glorious Memory of Alexius Meinong” and devoted to complexity, Gustav Bergmann claims that in Meinong’s ontology there are no complexes. Bergmann judges Meinong’s solution of the ontological problem of complexity, a problem he considers pivotal, to have failed. How can he, nevertheless, praise Meinong, which he does not only in the dedication? This is because Bergmann thinks that Meinong comes very close to the right ontological analysis of complexes which was a rare (...) achievement in his time. (shrink)

The book contains the first systematic study of the ontology and metaphysics of Gustav Bergmann, tracing their development from early (1940s) criticisms of Carnap's semantical theories in Introduction to Semantics, to their culmination in his 1992 New Foundations of Ontology. This involves a detailed study of the implicit metaphysical doctrines in Carnap's important, but long neglected, 1942 book and their connection to his influential views on reference, truth and modality, (including, contrary to current opinion, Carnap's initiating the development of predicate (...) modal logic) that culminated in Meaning and Necessity. In dealing with various fundamental issues in ontology and metaphysics, the book discusses relevant views of major philosophers, such as Russell, Moore, Bradley, Wittgenstein, Meinong, Brentano, Husserl, Broad, McTaggart, and Quine, and of contemporary and recent figures, including D. M. Armstrong, D. Lewis, S. Kripke, J. Searle, W. Sellars, D. Davidson, J. J. C. Smart, and H. Feigl. Building on the critical studies of Bergmann, Carnap and such other philosophers, the author argues for a form of Logical Realism derived from important, but long misunderstood and ignored, aspects of Russell's theories of descriptions, reference and truth. (shrink)

This posthumous work by Gustav Bergmann was essentially complete before his death in 1987.