Abstract

Gustav Bergmann was one of the youngest members of the Vienna Circle when he fled Austria in 1938 to seek asylum in the United States. Prior to 1938 he had published eight papers in German, seven in mathematics and one on psychoanalysis published in Imago. In 1940–43 his published papers were mainly on topics in the philosophy of physics and psychology. In 1944–45 his published work reflected the beginning of an intellectual journey which, to borrow from Coffa’s striking title, would take him from the positivism of the Vienna Station to Meinong’s Graz. The journey began in 1942 when he wrote a paper, published in 1944 in Mind, “Pure Semantics, Sentences and Propositions.” An earlier version had been sent to Church, as editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic, and to Carnap for his reactions to Bergmann’s criticisms of Carnap’s recent Introduction to Semantics.