Rudolf Carnap

Otto Neurath

John Von Neumann

Marguerite Young

Max Black

Herbert Feigl

Reinhardt Grossmann

Erwin Tegtmeier

Philipp Frank

Herbert Hochberg

Wilfrid Sellars

Alexius Meinong

Adolf Grünbaum

Gustav Bergmann

William Henry Hay

William Smith Heald

Edwin Bonar Allaire

May Brodbeck

Rosaria Egidi

Alan Michael Hausmann

Philosophers discussed include Franz Brentano, Kurt Gödel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Correspondents include May Brodbeck, Herbert Feigl, John von Neumann, and Marguerite Young.

Papers of Gustav Bergmann

The large majority of the papers in the present volume were collected by Bergmann under the title "Logic and Reality" which indicates the theme of an ontological foundation for logic or of an ontological analysis of analyticity. Actually, the theme is to be found in almost all of the papers of this volume. When Quine published his attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction, Bergmann defended it vehemently. In contrast to Carnap whom Quine criticised Bergmann takes "analytic" in the narrow sense of "logical truth". However, he later extended the area of the analytic a by including truths (falsehoods) expressing the intentional connection between mental states and the facts they purportedly intend. As can be gathered from Selected Papers I Bergmann is a dualist and became more and more interested in intentionality. Another element of the world's form usually not recognised and discovered by Bergmann is the exemplification tie or exemplification nexus which connects individuals and relational and non-relational universals. Intentionality and exemplification are brought together by Bergmann with logical conjunction and disjunction which he considers as connections in reality and not mere symbols. Moreover, Bergmann offers ontological assays of negation and quantification, of variables and their order. Bergmann holds that the recognition of the logical and categorial form of the world including the intentional connection is crucial to arrive at a tenable epistemological realism.

Selected papers. - 2. / Ed. by Erwin Tegtmeier. Vol. 2

Collected Works

Bergmann's early philosophical work concerned the foundations of psychology and physics (topics were e.g. the behaviorist J B Watson, operationism, psychoanalysis, psychological measurement, psychophysics, emergence and quantum physics). Bergmann was born in Vienna in 1906. After finishing the Gymnasium he registered at the University of Vienna. Before he took a Ph.D. in mathematics with a minor in philosophy in 1928, he had already been invited along with his Gymnasium classmate Kurt Godel to join the Vienna Circle, where he was especially influenced by Schlick, Waismann and Carnap. In 1929-30 Bergmann taught mathematics at a Realschule in Vienna and in the following year he went to Berlin to work as assistant of Einstein together with W. Mayer his dissertation director. Discouraged by the discrimination against Jews at German and Austrian universities Bergmann returned to Vienna to study law. He took a JD and went into a firm of corporation lawyers. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 Bergmann emigrated to the United States with financial assistance from Circle Member Otto Neurath. In 1939 he obtained an appointment at the University of Iowa as an assistant to the psychologist Kurt Lewin. He was employed to develop a mathematical representation of Lewin's psychological field theory. In 1940 Bergmann became assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, and in 1950 full professor of philosophy and psychology. During the 1960s and 1970s Bergmann had a major impact on contemporary philosophy and contemporary issues in the philosophy and methodology of psychology, attracting brilliant students who went on to teach in philosophy and psychology departments of leading universities of the United States. Bergmann and his philosophy students and followers were sometimes referred to as " The Iowa School" or " The Iowa Realists". It brought national and international status to a small philosophy department of a middle-sized midwestern university. From 1967-68 he served as president of the American Philosophical Association (Western Division) and in 1972 he was awarded the first named professorship in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Iowa as Carver Professor. Bergmann retired in 1974 and died in 1987.

Selected Papers

Realism is one of the most important philosophical books of the second half of the 20th century because of its metaphysical sophistication and the great progress it brings to the development of a form of direct realism that follows Brentano and Meinong. Bergmann's direct realism is systematic. It is thus set apart from the sketches of philosophical positions that are typically found in analytic philosophy. The book investigates the two alternative kinds of ontology, reistic and fact ontologies, and shows how the former kind leads to representationalism and idealism. In great detail it exposes the inner logic and the difficulties of representationalism and reconstructs the ontologies of Brentano and Meinong and their ensuing theories of knowledge. The question of how far they managed to overcome representationalism is a focus of the work.

Jürgen Daub

"Entdecke die Möglichkeiten" hieß es in einem Werbespruch. Handle so, dass mehr Möglichkeiten entstehen, sagte uns Heinz von Foerster. Das Leben ist voller Potenzialität. Es gibt immer Alternativen. Die festgefahrene Debatte um Mobilität möchten wir mit diesem Buch wieder in Bewegung bringen. Im Forschungsprojekt remonet wurden dazu bereits vielfältige Ansatzpunkte entwickelt. Viele Argumente und Ideen finden die Leserinnen und Leser in diesem Buch. Wir danken allen Autorinnen und Autoren für die kreativen Beiträge und wünschen viel Freude und Inspiration beim Lesen. Zugleich freuen wir uns auf weiteren Austausch.

Alternative Mobilität? - Möglichkeiten neuer Wege in der Automobilgesellschaft

Management und Marketing zwischen Ökologie und Ökonomie

Umweltgerechtes Produkt-Design

Feriha Özdemir

Weltweit sehen wir uns Tendenzen der Entdemokratisierung und Intoleranz gegenüber. In vielen Ländern ist eine Tendenz zur Diktatur zu beobachten. Nicht nur in Europa neigen zahlreiche Regierungen zu autokratischen Strukturen, dem Abbau von Sozial- und Rechtsstaat. Dem kann durch die weitere Kultivierung des demokratischen Staates entgegengewirkt werden. Dabei scheint es besonders geboten, über die Demokratisierung von Unternehmen und Organisationen nachzudenken, die als Hauptwirkungsstätten der Menschen fungieren. Demokratische Unternehmen können als Keimzellen für die Wiederbelebung der Demokratie dienen. Die AutorInnen veranschaulichen diesen Weg über die Forschungsfelder der Teilhabe, Mitwirkung und Verantwortung. Demokratie wird hier als eine Lebensform verstanden, die auf Respekt und Toleranz gründet. Demokraten eint die Erkenntnis, dass man nur gemeinsam zu guten und dauerhaften Lösungen und Entscheidungen kommt. In the last years, the worldwide trend towards a post-democracy, reactions and intolerance has clearly increased. In a lot of countries, and not only in Europe, there is a tendency towards autocratic structures, the dismantle of welfare and constitutional state. These negative developments can be counteracted by strengthening the democratic state. Particularly, the democratization of enterprises and organizations can strengthen democracy that is based on respect and tolerance. This book presents different ways towards the idea of a democratic economy and enterprise by focusing on the research fields of participation, involvement, contribution and responsibility. Democratic enterprises can be a nucleus for the revival of the democracy.

Teilhabe, Mitwirkung, Verantwortung. Mit einem Vorwort von Michael Quante

Wirtschaft demokratisch

This posthumous work by Gustav Bergmann was essentially complete before his death in 1987. In it, he proposes a systematic ontological system that would account for all the basic areas of human thought and experience within an extended framework of logical atomism. Bergmann's approach to traditional problems of ontology seeks to balance the competing demands of phenomenology, which emphasizes the reality presented to us by experience, and of metaphysics, which delineates the most general kinds of existents given in experience and the most general kinds of relationships they bear to one another. Beginning with atomic facts composed of phenomenally presented qualities, Bergmann goes on to develop an ontology that can account for the ordinary objects of everyday experience, the mental states through which we become aware of and acquire knowledge of these objects, and even the truths of logic and mathematics that allow us to extend our thought and discourse about ordinary objects beyond what may be phenomenally apparent. Many ontologists will be particularly interested in the attention Bergmann pays to the concept of logical form. In his earlier works, Bergmann claimed that "the form of the world is in the world"; the "fact" that a thing or a complex has a certain logical or syntactic form, he argued, is itself one more fact of our experienced reality, rather than a contribution of the mind or of linguistic conventions. Critics of this claim have suggested that paradoxes and contradictions result from it. In New Foundations of Ontology Bergmann responds, arguing that his concept of logical form does not necessarily create the problems noted in earlier critiques.

New Foundations of Ontology

Logic and Reality

Gustav Bergmann

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