New foundations of ontology
Choice Reviews Online · 1993
This posthumous work by Gustav Bergmann was essentially complete before his death in 1987. In it, he proposes an ontological system that would account for all 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 competing demands of phenomenology, which emphasizes reality presented to us by experience, and of metaphysics, which delineates most general kinds of existents given in experience and 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 ordinary objects of everyday experience, mental state through which we become aware of and acquire knowledge of these objects, and even 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 attention Bergmann pays to concept of logical form. In his earlier works, Bergmann claimed that the form of world is in world; 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 mind or of linguistic conventions. Critics of this claim have suggested that paradoxes and contradictions result form it. In New Foundations of Ontology Bergmann responds, arguing that his concept of logical form does not necessarily create problems noted in earlier critiques.