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430L'ontologia del senso communeIn Evandro Agazzi (ed.), Valore E Limiti Del Senso Comune, Milan: Francoangeli. pp. 261-284. 2004.Common sense is on the one hand a certain set of processes of natural cognition – of speaking, reasoning, seeing, and so on. On the other hand common sense is a system of beliefs (of folk physics, folk psychology and so on). Over against both of these is the world of common sense, the world of objects to which the processes of natural cognition and the corresponding belief-contents standardly relate. What are the structures of this world? How does the scientific treatment of this world relate to…Read more
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236Historicity, Value and MathematicsIn A. T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Ingardeniana, . pp. 219-239. 1976.At the beginning of the present century, a series of paradoxes were discovered within mathematics which suggested a fundamental unclarity in traditional mathematical methods. These methods rested on the assumption of a realm of mathematical idealities existing independently of our thinking activity, and in order to arrive at a firmly grounded mathematics different attempts were made to formulate a conception of mathematical objects as purely human constructions. It was, however, realised that s…Read more
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394An Essay in Formal OntologyGrazer Philosophische Studien 6 (1): 39-62. 1978.As conceived by analytic philosophers ontology consists in the application of the methods of mathematical logic to the analysis of ontological discourse. As conceived by realist philosophers such as Meinong and the early Husserl, Reinach and Ingarden, it consists in the investigation of the forms of entities of various types. The suggestion is that formal methods be employed by phenomenological ontologists, and that phenomenological insights may contribute to the construction of adequate formal-…Read more
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174On Tractarian lawIn Smith Barry (ed.), Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle and Critical Rationalism, Vienna: Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 31-35. 1979."'It is clear", wrote Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, "that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of the terms" (6.422). But he insisted also that there must be some kind of ethical punishment and reward; "the reward", he tells us, "must be something pleasant, and the punishment something unpleasant" (ibid.). I argue that we can understand what Wittgenstein meant by "reward" and "punishment" by conceiving these notions as elements in a system of interrelated conce…Read more
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1621Kafka and Brentano: A Study in Descriptive PsychologyIn Structure and Gestalt: Philosophy and Literature in Austria-Hungary and Her Successor States, John Benjamins. pp. 113-144. 1981.There is a narrow thread in the vast literature on Kafka which pertains to Kafka’s knowledge of philosophy, and more precisely to Kafka’s use in his fictional writings of some of the main ideas of Franz Brentano. Kafka attended courses in philosophy at the Charles University given by Brentano’s students Anton Marty and Christian von Ehrenfels, and was for several years a member of a discussion-group organized by orthodox adherents of the Brentanian philosophy in Prague. The present essay summari…Read more
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198R. Schmit, Husserls Philosophie der Mathematik. Platonistische und konstruktivistische Momente in Husserls Mathematikbegriff (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 4 (2): 230. 1983.
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542Acta cum fundamentis in reDialectica 38 (2‐3): 157-178. 1984.It will be the thesis of this paper that there are among our mental acts some which fall into the category of real material relations. That is: some acts are necessarily such as to involve a plurality of objects as their relata or fundamenta. Suppose Bruno walks into his study and sees a cat. To describe the seeing, here, as a relation, is to affirm that it serves somehow to tie Bruno to the cat. Bruno's act of seeing, unlike his feeling depressed, his putative thinking-about-Santa-Claus or his …Read more
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266Phänomenologie und angelsächsische PhilosophiePhilosophischer Literaturanzeiger 37 387-405. 1984.Review article on recent publications in phenomenology
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23E. Husserl, Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie. Texte aus dem Nachlass (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 6 (2): 223-249. 1985.
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389Wittgenstein und das ethische GesetzIn Dieter Birnbacher & Armin Burkhardt (eds.), Sprachspiel und Methode: zum Stand der Wittgenstein-Diskussion, De Gruyter. pp. 191-211. 1985.Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt den Versuch dar, die normative Seite von Wittgensteins Frühwerk herauszuarbeiten und dabei an seinem Ansatz insofern Kritik zu üben, als gezeigt wird, wie sehr dessen Implikationen mit unseren üblichen ethischen Vorstellungen in Konflikt stehen. Die Arbeit hat aber auch einen etwas wohlwollenderen Aspekt: Sie versucht zu zeigen, wie Wittgensteins scheinbar widersinnige Ansichten so formuliert werden können, daß sie zumindest begreifbar erscheinen. Zu diesem Zweck b…Read more
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301A theory of AustriaIn Nyiri J. N. (ed.), From Bolzano to Wittgenstein: The Tradition of Austrian Philosophy, Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 11-30. 1986.The present essay seeks, by way of the Austrian example, to make a contribution to what might be called the philosophy of the supranational state. More specifically, we shall attempt to use certain ideas on the philosophy of Gestalten as a basis for understanding some aspects of that political and cultural phenomenon which was variously called the Austrian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Danube Monarchy or Kakanien.
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293Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, II. Band, 1. und 2 (review)Grazer Philosophische Studien 27 (1): 199-207. 1986.
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558A Husserlian Theory of IndexicalityGrazer Philosophische Studien 28 (1): 133-163. 1986.The paper seeks to develop an account of indexical phenomena based on the highly general theory of structure and dependence set forth by Husserl in his Logical Investigations. Husserl here defends an Aristotelian theory of meaning, viewing meanings as species or universals having as their instances certain sorts of concrete meaning acts. Indexical phenomena are seen to involve the combination of such acts of meaning with acts of perception, a thesis here developed in some detail and contrasted w…Read more
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940A relational theory of the actTopoi 5 (2): 115-130. 1986.‘What is characteristic of every mental activity’, according to Brentano, is ‘the reference to something as an object. In this respect every mental activity seems to be something relational.’ But what sort of a relation, if any, is our cognitive access to the world? This question – which we shall call Brentano’s question – throws a new light on many of the traditional problems of epistemology. The paper defends a view of perceptual acts as real relations of a subject to an object. To make this v…Read more
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351The Ontology of EpistemologyReports in Philosophy 11 57-66. 1987.Ingarden’s puzzle is: how can we come to know what is essentially involved in an act of knowing? As starting point he takes what he holds to be a particular good candidate example of such an act, namely an act of perceiving an apple. Here we have act and object standing in a certain first-level relation to each other. We now in a second level act of reflection, make this first-level relation into an object, and strive to apprehend this object as an instantiation of the essence knowledge. But how…Read more
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446Einleitung zu Anton Marty, "Elemente der deskriptiven Psychologie"Conceptus: Zeitschrift Fur Philosophie 21 (53-54): 33-47. 1987.This essay is an introduction to a lecture course "Elements of Descriptive Psychology" delivered by Anton Marty in around 1903/04. Marty offered courses on descriptive psychology at regular intervals in the course of his career at the University of Prague. The content of these courses follows closely the ideas of Marty’s teacher Franz Brentano, though with some interesting divergences and extrapolations. The present work is a historical and systematic introduction to an extract from notes taken …Read more
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174The politics of national diversitySalisbury Review 5 33--37. 1987.On the consequences of the interplay between the diversity of ethnic, national, cultural and linguistic groupings in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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35Paul Gochet, Ascent to Truth: A Critical Examination of Quine’s Philosophy (Munich/Vienna 1986) (review)Grazer Philosophische Studien 30 (1): 212-213. 1987.
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608Logic and formal ontologyIn Barry Smith (ed.), Constraints on Correspondence, Hölder/pichler/tempsky. pp. 29-67. 1989.The current resurgence of interest in cognition and in the nature of cognitive processing has brought with it also a renewed interest in the early work of Husserl, which contains one of the most sustained attempts to come to grips with the problems of logic from a cognitive point of view. Logic, for Husserl, is a theory of science; but it is a theory which takes seriously the idea that scientific theories are constituted by the mental acts of cognitive subjects. The present essay begins with an …Read more
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501Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology. The Case of Emil Lask and Johannes DaubertKant Studien 82 (3): 303-318. 1991.Johannes Daubert he was an acknowledged leader, and in some respects the founder, of the early phenomenological movement, and was considered – as much by its members as by Husserl himself – the most brilliant member of the group. In Daubert’s unpublished writings we find a series of reflections on Lask, and on Neo-Kantianism, which form the subject-matter of this paper. They range over topics such as the ontology of the ‘Sachverhalt’ or state of affairs, truthvalues (Wahrheitswerte) and the val…Read more
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360Relevance, relatedness and restricted set theoryIn Georg Schurz (ed.), Advances in Scientific Philosophy, . pp. 45-56. 1991.Relevance logic has become ontologically fertile. No longer is the idea of relevance restricted in its application to purely logical relations among propositions, for as Dunn has shown in his (1987), it is possible to extend the idea in such a way that we can distinguish also between relevant and irrelevant predications, as for example between “Reagan is tall” and “Reagan is such that Socrates is wise”. Dunn shows that we can exploit certain special properties of identity within the context of s…Read more
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309Le strutture del mondo del senso communeIride 9 22-44. 1992.The paper seeks to show how the world of everyday human cognition might be treated as an object of ontological investigation in its own right. The paper is influenced by work on affordances and prototypicality of psychologists such as Gibson and Rosch, by work on cognitive universals of the anthropologist Robin Horton, and by work of Patrick Hayes and others on ‘naive’ or ‘qualitative physics’. It defends a thesis to the effect that there is, at the heart of common sense, a theoretical core of t…Read more
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566Derrida degree: A question of honourThe Times 9 (May 9). 1992.A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.
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158Puntel on Truth, Or: Old Idealistic Wine in New Semantic BottlesEthik Und Sozialwissenschaften 3 (2): 166-169. 1992.
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937The philosophy of Austrian economics (review)The Review of Austrian Economics 7 (2): 127-132. 1994.Review of The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, by David Gordon. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993.
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314The truth about fictionIn Wlodzimierz Galewicz, Elisabth Ströker & Wladyslaw Strozewski (eds.), Kunst und Ontologie: Für Roman Ingarden zum 100. Geburtstag, Brill. pp. 97-118. 1994.Ingarden distinguishes four strata making up the structure of the literary work of art: the stratum of word sounds and sound-complexes; the stratum of meaning units; the stratum of represented objectivities (characters, actions, settings, and so forth); and the stratum of schematized aspects (perspectives under which the represented objectivities are given to the reader). It is not only works of literature which manifest this four-fold structure but also certain borderline cases such as newspape…Read more
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385Filozofia austriacka i dziedzictwo BrentanyPrincipia 8 19-50. 1994.A study of the contrasts between Austrian and German philosophy, with special reference to the role of logic and science, of the Brentano School and the Vienna Circle, and of the different ways in which Austrian and German ways of thinking have influenced contemporary analytical and Continental philosophy.
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1068The Four Phases of PhilosophyRodopi. 1994.Introduction and translation of “The Four Phases of Philosophy” by Franz Brentano.
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1043Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz BrentanoOpen Court. 1994.This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much to demonstrate the continued fertility of the id…Read more
Barry Smith
University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
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University at BuffaloDepartment of Philosophy
Biomedical Informatics
Neurology
Computer Science and EngineeringDistinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair -
National Center for Ontological ResearchAdministrator
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APA Eastern Division
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Ontology |
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence |
Philosophy of Biology |