The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy Of

This collection of twelve essays is an excellent book on Gustav Bergmann's philosophy. With the exception of W. Sellars' "Seeing, Seeming, and Sensing," K. Lehrer's "Belief and Error," and E. Steinus' "The Problem of Color Incompatibility," all of the essays are about central themes in Bergmann's philosophy. What adds to the high quality of the book is that it contains serious criticisms of Bergmann as well as alternative answers to the problems posed by him. The book contains much original philosophy and metaphilosophy, but rather than attempt to review all of the essays in it, I will concentrate on a few of the fundamental issues that are raised in some of them. The first essay by P. Butchvarov concerns nothing less than the nature and "The Limits of Ontological Analysis." According to Butchvarov, ontological analysis is "any philosophical [as opposed to linguistic, psychological or scientific] inquiry into the nature and existence of entities or states of affairs,.., that attempts to answer philosophical questions of the form 'What is x?' by specifying what such an entity consists of, what its constituents or elements are..." (p. 5). He argues that ontological analysis reaches its limit in its attempt to solve the problem of the unity of complex entities and