Gustav Bergmann was one of the youngest members of the Vienna Circle when he fled Austria in 1938 to seek asylum in the United States. Prior to 1938 he had published eight papers in German, seven in mathematics and one on psychoanalysis published in Imago. In 1940–43 his published papers were mainly on topics in the philosophy of physics and psychology. In 1944–45 his published work reflected the beginning of an intellectual journey which, to borrow from Coffa’s striking title, would (...) take him from the positivism of the Vienna Station to Meinong’s Graz. The journey began in 1942 when he wrote a paper, published in 1944 in Mind, “Pure Semantics, Sentences and Propositions.” An earlier version had been sent to Church, as editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic, and to Carnap for his reactions to Bergmann’s criticisms of Carnap’s recent Introduction to Semantics. (shrink)
On March 12, 1938 the German army crossed the border into Austria. By the following September Gustav Bergmann had managed to send his first wife, Anna, and his daughter, Hanna, to safety in England. In October he managed to leave Austria himself. He first went to the Hague in the Netherlands to see Otto Neurath, who gave him enough money to assist his passage to New York. Bergmann’s prospects were quite uncertain at that time and it was not clear that (...) he would ever be able to repay Neurath. Neurath told Bergmann not to worry about repayment; he merely requested that Bergmann writes something about his recollections of the Vienna Circle. Bergmann wrote the following letter on the S. S. Staatendam while enroute to New York City to begin his new life. (shrink)
These are two related essays. The first, “Meaning,” defends the so-called reference theory against current criticisms. Exemplification and the intentional tie are two subsistents. Subsistence is a mode of existence; mere possibility is another. That requires two distinctions; one among four uses of 'possible'; one among three uses of 'same' in the phrase 'the same fact'; which in turn permits an adequate account of false belief. The second essay, “Inclusion, Exemplification, and Inherence in G. E. Moore,” displays the impact of (...) the fundamental ontological dialectic on the development of Moore's thought. His notion of nonnatural properties provides the early cue. His eventual failure to account for false belief is traced to his eventual nominalism. (shrink)
