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An intermittent but mentally quite disabling illness prevented Henry Mehlberg from becoming recognized more widely as the formidable scholar he was, when at his best. During World War II, he had lived in hiding under the false identity of an egg farmer, when the Nazis occupied his native Poland. After relatively short academic appointments at the University of Toronto and at Princeton University, he taught at the University of Chicago until reaching the age of normal retirement. But partly at the initiative of his Chicago colleague Charles Morris, who had preceded him to a 'post-retirement' profes sorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and with the support of Eugene Wigner, he then received an appointment at that University, where he remained until his death in 1979. In Chicago, he organized a discussion group of scholars from that area as a kind of small scale model of the Vienna Circle, which met at his apart ment, where he lived with his first wife Janina, a mathematician. It was during this Chicago period that the functional disturbances from his illness were pronounced and not infrequent. The very unfortunate result was that colleagues who had no prior knowledge of the caliber of his writings in Polish and French or of his very considerable intellectual powers, had little incentive to read his published work, which he had begun to write in English.
List of contents
to Volumes I and II.- I: The Causal Theory of Time in the Works of Its Principal Representatives.- I. Leibniz and the Beginnings of the Causal Theory of Time.- II. Kant's Phenomenalist Interpretation of the Causal Theory of Time.- III. Lechalas' Adaptation of the Causal Theory of Time to the Laws of pre-Einsteinian Physics.- IV. The Relativistic Phase of the Causal Theory of Time: The Axiomatic Systems of Robb and Carnap.- V. The Relativistic Phase of the Causal Theory of Time: The Work of Reichenbach.- VI. Russell's Causal Explanation of Duration.- VII. Alternative Approaches to Time's Arrow.- II: Duration and Causality.- VIII. The Intuitive Foundations of the Knowledge of Time.- IX. Physical Time.- X. Non-Physical Time.- Supplement.- 1. The Present Empirical Status of Psychophysical Parallelism.- 2. Conceptual Analysis of Psychophysical Parallelism.- Notes.- Index of Names.
