Gustav Bergmann came to the United States in 1938 from Vienna, Austria, where he had earned a JD and a PhD in mathematics. He had also been a junior member of the Vienna Circle.

In 1939 he became a faculty member at the University of Iowa, retiring in 1976. He held a joint appointment in the Departments of Philosophy and Psychology. He regularly taught a course on the history and philosophy of psychology. Bergmann became well known as an apologist for behaviorism. Significantly, he distinguished between methodological and metaphysical behaviorism, embracing the former and rejecting the latter. Bergmann never wavered in his ontological commitment to the mental.

Bergmann also published in mathematics, the philosophy of physics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of law. His Philosophy of Science (1957) is an elegant and still useful work. He was, however, first and foremost a philosopher, an ontologist to...