Herbert Hochberg is one of the most influential analytical philosophers and one of the most influential critics of analytical philosophy. He disputed with almost all leading analytical philosophers, from Quine, Goodman and Wilfrid Sellars to David Lewis and David Armstrong. His point of view is ontological and he harks back to the origins of analytical philosophy where he finds unknown precursors of current views. And he finds parallels to contemporary non-analytic philosophies. In his own ontology he tries to dispense with simple particulars.

Thought, Fact, and Reference was first published in 1978.Against a background of criticism of alternative accounts, Professor Hochberg presents an analysis of thought, reference, and truth within the tradition of logical atomism. He analyzes G. E. Moore's early attack on idealism and examines the influence of Moore on the development of Bertrand Russell's and Ludwig Wittgenstein's logical atomism. He traces an early divergence between Russell and Wittgenstein, on the one side, and Moore and Gottlob Frege on the other, into variants recently advocated by Wilfrid Sellars, Gustav Bergmann, and others. The work will be of interest to professional philosophers, graduate students in philosophy, and linguists with interests in philosophy.

This work is both an excellent primer in the development of twentieth-century philosophy, and at the same time, a critique of its linguistic excesses and separation from the world as such. Herbert Hochberg takes as his cue the words of Bertrand Russell that "absorption in language sometimes leads to a neglect of the connection of language with non-linguistic facts, although it is this connection that gives meaning to words and significance to sentences." Introducing Analytic Philosophy is a balanced effort to stay within the linguistic turns that have characterized philosophy in the past century. The author does this by a review of those philosophies that treat things and facts seriously. It is Hochberg's contention that the classical focus on ontology, combined with precise and careful formulations that marked the writings of the early founders of the analytic tradition, has degenerated into the spinning of intricate webs of verbal analysis. The latter supposedly yield theories of meaning, but more often signal the rebirth of idealism in the guises of anti-realism and internal realism. The focus on the world, as what words are about, is often lost by analytic philosophers who concentrate on language itself at the cost of the world itself. Such trends toward linguistic exclusivity have come to typify analytic tradition in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as continental European tendencies. Hochberg is unafraid of a polemical accounting of those trends that display arrogance toward and ignorance of the philosophical tradition that such tendencies illustrate, even in influential works. The book discusses in depth the early works of Frege, Meinong, and Bradley, and follows these with examinations of Russell, Wittgenstein, and other important, if lesser-known works. The author notes the processes by which the early analytic tradition, with its careful and precise formulations, was sometimes transformed into dismissal of real-world concerns as such. The work is clear and incisive. It can be read with great benefit by scientists and students of culture, no less than specialists in the history of philosophy. Herbert Hochberg is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin. Among his works are critical related essays in Philosophical Studies, Methodos, Nous, and a series of edited volumes.

All except three of the papers in this volume were presented at the colloquium on "L'Ontologie formelle aujourd'hui", Geneva, 3-5 June 1988. The three exceptions, the papers by David Armstrong, Uwe Meixner and Wolfgang Lenzen, were presented at the colloquium on "Properties", Zinal, June 1-3, 1990. It was, incidentally, at the second of these two colloquia that the European Society for Analytic Philosophy came into being. The fathers of analytic philosophy - Moore and Russell - were in no doubt that ontology or metaphysics as well as the topics oflanguage, truth and logic constituted the core subject-matter of their "analytic realism", 1 for the task of metaphysics as they conceived things was the description of 2 the world. And logic and ontology are indissolubly linked in the system of the grandfather of analytic philosophy, Frege. After the Golden Age of analytic philosophy - in Cambridge and Austria - opposition to realism as well as the "linguistic turn" contributed for a long time to the eclipse of ontology. 3 Thanks in large measure to the work of some of the senior contributors to the present volume - Roderick Chisholm, Herbert Hochberg, David Armstrong and Karel Lambert - ontology and metaphysics now enjoy once again the central position they occupied some eighty years ago in the heyday of analytic philosophy.

Mathematics in and behind Russell's logicism, and its reception / I. Grattan-Guinness -- Russell's philosophical background / Nicholas Griffin -- Russell and Moore, 1898-1905 / Richard L. Cartwright -- Russell and Frege / Michael Beaney -- Bertrand Russell's logicism / Martin Godwyn and Andrew D. Irvine -- The theory of descriptions / Peter Hylton -- Russell's substitutional theory / Gregory Landini -- The theory of types / Alasdair Urquhart -- Russell's method of analysis / Paul Hager -- Russell's neutral monism / R.E. Tully -- The metaphysics of logical atomism / Bernard Linksy -- Russell's structuralism and the absolute description of the world / William Demopoulos -- From knowledge by acquaintance to knowledge by causation / Thomas Baldwin -- Russell, experience, and the roots of science / A.C. Grayling -- Bertrand Russell: moral philosopher or unphilosophical moralist? / Charles R. Pidgen.

Gustav Bergmann (1906-1987) was, arguably, the greatest ontologist of the twentieth century in pursuing the fundamental questions of first philosophy as deeply as any philosopher of any time. In 2006 and 2007, international conferences devoted solely to Bergmann’s work were held at the University of Iowa in the USA, Université de Provence in France, and Università degli Studi Roma Tre in Italy. The papers in this volume were presented at the first of these conferences, in Iowa City, where Bergmann taught for nearly four decades after escaping from Europe, following the dissolution of the Vienna Circle of which he had been the youngest member. There are nine philosophical papers, reminiscences of three of his students, and a complete bibliography of his published writings.

Central to Elements is an assay of the attributional union properties and relations have with their subjects, a topic historically left metaphorical. The work critiques eight Aristotelian assumptions concerning attribute dependence and ‘inherence’, per se subjects (‘substances’), attributes as agent-organizers, and unity-by-a-shared-one. Groups of these assumptions are seen to yield contradiction, vicious regress, or other problems. This analysis, joined with insights from an assay of ubiquitous structure, motivate ten theses explicating attribution and its primary ontic status. The theses detail: attributes proper as individuated instances, structure as instance-generated facts and their two forms of composition, the conditioning role and universal nature of instances’ component intensions, the primacy of attribute instances for generating all forms of composition and complex entities, and identity and indiscernibility criteria for the latter. Principal is the insight that attribution is intension-determined combinatorial agency. It is its systematizing implications that provide solutions to classic problems, e.g., Composition, Individuation, and Universals, and in net generate a comprehensive one-category structuralist ontology.