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ways of doing it, but it is wrong to project it far into the past: it did not exist at the turn of the century and only became clearly apparent after the Second World War. I recently taught at an American university on the his tory of philosophy from Balzano to Husserl. The course title had to come from a fixed pool and gave trouble. Was it philosophical logic, the nine teenth century, or phenomenology? A logic title would connote over this period Frege, Russell, Carnap, perhaps a mention of Boole: not continental enough. The nineteenth century? The century of Kant's successors: Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuer bach, Marx, Nietzsche? What have they to do with Balzano, Lotze, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl and Twardowski? Even tually 'Phenomenology' was chosen, misdescribing more than half of the course. That illustrates the problems one faces in trying to work against the picture of the period which is ingrained in minds and syllabuses. This book arises from my efforts to combat that picture. I backed into writing about the history of recent philosophy rather than setting out to do so. The beginning was chance. In Manchester in the early seventies, at a time when most English philosophy departments breathed re cycled Oxford air, the intellectual atmosphere derived from Cambridge and Warsaw, spiced with a breath of Freiburg and Paris.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Central Europe in the history of philosophy.- 2. Bolzano, Tarski, and the limits of logic.- 3. Brentano's reform of logic.- 4. The formalization of Husserl's theory of wholes and parts.- 5. Frege's theory of real numbers.- 6. The Anglo-Austrian Analytic Axis.- 7. On what there isn't: the Meinong-Russell dispute.- 8. ?ukasiewicz, Meinong, and many-valued logic.- 9. On understanding Le?niewski.- 10. A Brentanian basis for Lesniewskian logic.- 11. Le?niewski's logic and its relations to classical and free logics.- 12. A semantics for Ontology.- 13. The old problem of complex and fact.- 14. Tractatus-Mereologico-Philosophicus? A Brentanian look at Wittgenstein, and a moral.- 15. Wittgenstein, Schlick and the a priori.- 16. Categories and ways of being.- Index of Persons.- Index of Subjects.- Index of Cities.
