Why Categories Matter: Grossmann and Beyond

Abstract

My copy of Reinhardt Grossmann?s The Categorial Structure of the World (CSW) contains the affectionate inscription ?To the Three Musketeers! With best wishes for their future adventures! R.G.? The other two musketeers were and are Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith, Manchester Mitkampfer for ontology in the 1970s and 1980s in what was otherwise a sea of logicians and philosophers of language. Reinhardt had noticed the affinity in our taste for ontology, and it was not accidental, because we three had early recognized the Iowa School of Gustav Bergmann and his students including also Herb Hochberg and Ed Allaire as pioneers struggling nobly to get philosophers to concentrate again on the things them?selves rather than just our representations of them. The other bond we shared with Grossmann was that because of his German background he was more familiar with the German-speaking tradition of Bolzano, Brentano and Husserl than most English-speaking philosophers of that time (or indeed since). Like him we felt that much modern analytic philosophy suffered from historical blinkeredness. The situation has improved considerably since those days in both respects, obwohl es noch in mancher Hinsicht zu wunschen ubrig lasst, as we say in Ireland.