Collected Works Vol. III, Realism

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.