83:1 January 2000
Austrian Realism: From Aristotelian Roots to the Vienna Circle 

Advisory Editor: Herbert Hochberg, Austin, Texas

From the time of Bolzano there developed a tradition of realistic metaphysics that can be called "the Austrian tradition." Rooted in Aristotelian and Scholastic ideas about thoughts and their referents, this tradition flourished in the work of Brentano and his students and influenced the analytic realism of Russell and Moore in England and of the Uppsala School in Sweden. It consistently opposed the psychologism that has come to permeate contemporary philosophy, while recognizing the need to continue the phenomenological as well as the logical side of the analytic tradition. Ironically, while the earlier analytic realists opposed Kantian and Hegelian idealism, strains of idealism were spawned by the later writings of Husserl and Wittgenstein, as well as by the Neurath wing of the Vienna Circle. Today, as idealism spreads in the fashionable variants of anti-realism, pragmatism, post-modernism, instrumentalism, etc., realism in the Austrian tradition can still provide a valuable alternative. This issue of The Monist is devoted to papers on the history and the contemporary viability of analytic realism in logic and philosophy.

Table of Contents:

Mario Mignucci 

Parts, Quantification and Aristotelian Predication

Deborah Brown 

Immanence and Individuation: Brentano and the Scholastics on Knowledge of Singulars

Jan Berg 

From Bolzano’s Point of View

Peter Simons 

The Four Phases of Philosophy: Brentano’s Theory and Austria’s History

Erwin Tegtmeier 

Meinong’s Complexes

Ingvar Johansson 

Determinables as Universals

Per Lindström 

Quasi-Realism in Mathematics

D. M. Armstrong 

Difficult Cases in the Theory of Truthmaking

Johanna Seibt 

Constitution Theory and Metaphysical Neutrality: A Lesson for Ontology?