Barry Smith

Вопреки неподдельному интересу современной философии к проблеме языка, мы обратим нашеописание и рассуждение лицом к совокупности повседневного опыта, не признаваемого философией, засчитанными исключениями, адекватным предметом теоретического анализа. В представленном далеетексте я намерен обосновать возможность онтологического осмысления здравосмысленного мира кактакового. И здесь же я ставлю перед собой цель понять как подобная интерпретация может помочьлучшему философскому видению структур и физической действительности, и познания.

To what in reality do true logically simple sentences with empirical content correspond? Two extreme positions can be distinguished in this regard: ‘Great Fact’ theories, such as are defended by Davidson; and trope-theories, which see such sentences being made true simply by those events or states to which the relevant main verbs correspond. A position midway between these two extremes is defended, one according to which sentences of the given sort are made true by what are called ‘dependence structures’, or in other words by certain complex concrete portions of reality between the parts of which relations of dependence are defined. Principles governing such dependence-structures are laid down, principles of an ontologically motivated sort which serve as basis for a “topological semantics” conceived as an alternative to standard set-theoretic approaches to semantics of the Tarskian sort. These principles are then used to resolve certain puzzles generated by the (semantically motivated) theory of events put forward by Davidson

Nicht alles in der Welt unseres Handelns und Wahrnehmens ist entweder eine Substanz oder ein Akzidenz. Um diese These zu begruenden, sollen zunachst Elemente einer Ontologie des Sessels entwickelt werden. Der Sessel ist ein Artefakt, und nach ueberlieferter aristotelischer Lehre ist ein Artefakt die Summe seiner substantiellen Teile. Ein Sessel ist also eine Summe von Holz-, Leder- und Polsterstoffen, die selbst als Summen von entsprechenden Fasern oder Molekuelen aufzufassen waren, bis hin zur prima materia oder zu den sonstigen substantiellen Grundkonstituenten der materiellen Wirklichkeit.

Logic is often conceived as a science of propositions, or of relations between propositions. There is an alternative view, however, defended by Meinong, Pfänder, Reinach and others, which sees logic as a science of “Sachverhalte” or states of affairs. A consideration of this view, which was defended especially by thinkers within the tradition of Brentano, throws new light on the problems of intentionality and of mental content. It throws light also on the development of logic in Poland. Here the influence of Brentano’s student Kasimir Twardowski is especially important, and the paper concludes with a new interpretation of Tarski’s work on truth against the background of Twardowski’s thinking.

Abstract As Kevin Mulligan, more than anyone else, has demonstrated, there is a distinction within the philosophy of the German-speaking world between two principal currents: of idealism or transcendentalism, characteristic of Northern Germany, on the one hand; and of realism or objectivism, characteristic of Austria and the South, on the other. We explore some of the implications of this distinction with reference to the influence of Austrian (and German) philosophy on philosophical developments in Hungary, focusing on the work of Ákos von Pauler, and especially on Pauler’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

We outline initial work aligning the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Information Exchange Standard (IES), illustrating how key design patterns and content structures can be connected across the two frameworks. Our analysis highlights points of ontological convergence and divergence, guided by scenarios and supported by formal modeling. The study contributes to methodologies for mapping between upper-level ontologies and standards-based models while providing insights for communities aiming to improve semantic interoperability.

We introduce a framework for representing information about entities that do not exist or may never exist, such as those involving fictional entities, blueprints, simulations, and future scenarios. Traditional approaches that introduce “dummy instances” or rely on modal logic are criticized, and a proposal is defended in which the cases in question are modeled using the intersections of actual types rather than specific non-existent tokens. The paper positions itself within the Basic Formal Ontology paradigm and its realist commitments, emphasizing the importance of practical, implementable solutions over purely metaphysical or philosophical proposals. We argue that existing approaches to non-existent entities either overcommit to metaphysical assumptions or introduce computational inefficiencies that hinder applications. By developing a structured ontology-driven approach to unreal patterns, the paper aims to provide a useful and computationally viable means of handling references to hypothetical or non-existent entities.

This is a translation of Barry Smith, “Matematyka a Ontologiczna Estetyka Ingardena”, Studia Filozoficzne 1 (122):51-56 (1976). In the first part of this article I outline a theory of the mode of existence of mathematical objects using the aesthetic and ontological conceptual apparatus developed by Roman Ingarden in The Controversy over the Existence of the World and The Literary Work of Art . The second part contains an attempt to apply the results obtained beyond mathematics, to thought in general, as well as to art and value theory.

If media studies are to become established as a genuine science, then it needs to be determined what the subject matter of this science is to be. The chapter proposes a specification of this subject matter as consisting of: (1) the new sorts of digital entities that have been added to social reality through the invention of the digital computer, and (2) the new sorts of interactions involving human beings that such entities make possible. The chapter supports this proposal by examining examples of some of the ways in which the digital products of emerging media differ from entities of other sorts. The chapter then draws consequences from this examination to demonstrate how these products mark out a new realm within the larger domain of social ontology.

With the widespread use of vaccines in research and clinical settings, there is an urgent need to standardize vaccine representation, integrate information across diverse vaccine types, and support computer-assisted reasoning. Accordingly, we have since 2007 developed the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO), which aligns with the Basic Formal Ontology and adheres to OBO Foundry principles. VO models ontologically vaccines, vaccine components, vaccine immune responses, vaccine investigation studies and other vaccine-related topics. VO represents more than 10,000 vaccines targeting 289 infectious pathogens and cancers in humans and over 30 nonhuman animal species. VO provides mappings to external resources such as RxNorm, CVX, FDA, and USDA. Various VO use cases exist. VO facilitates vaccine standardization in resources such as the VIOLIN vaccine database, ImmPort, and the Vaccine Adjuvant Compendium (VAC). Semantic queries can be made to query VO. VO has been shown to enhance experimental and clinical vaccine data analysis and vaccine literature mining. Overall, VO standardizes vaccine modeling and representation and greatly supports vaccine AI research in the Semantic Web era.

Digitalization and AI are bringing about the automation of many aspects of our market economies. We shall argue, however, that there is one market phenomenon which AI will never be in a position to automate, namely the phenomenon of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is in several respects uniquely human. It involves on the one hand creativity, which is the ability to produce something that is novel but at the same time salient to outsiders. And on the other hand it involves the feature of alertness, that is the ability to detect unpredictable features of the surroundings of the entrepreneur. Humans are uniquely aware of their surroundings because they are able to draw on ways of gaining knowledge about such surroundings in virtue of their existence as living human organisms. These ways of gaining knowledge are often unconscious, and the knowledge itself provides immediate links to avenues of future response. AI systems, on the other hand, can only handle mathematical algorithms created on the basis of historical training data. We will make the claim that humans can deal with novel situations in creative ways because, unlike AI systems, they can develop the necessary practical know-how through lived experience of the relevant market phenomena. We will then show that even the most powerful generative AI models that we can foresee cannot harness practical knowledge and therefore will fail to emulate human alertness. Our argument has implications not only for the understanding of entrepreneurship but also for the so-called calculation debate. If we are right, then digitalization and AI will never change the fact that human entrepreneurs situated in market contexts are irreplaceable components of the market economy. The argument thereby implies a critique of attempts to replace individual human entrepreneurs with collectives. Neither AI models nor social organizations can achieve anything like 'cooperative entrepreneurship' or 'intrapreneurship' in a way that would diminish the essential market role of the individual human entrepreneur.

The pathbreaking scientific advances of recent years call for a new philosophical consideration of the fundamental categories of biology and its neighboring disciplines. Above all, the new information technologies used in biomedical research, and the necessity to master the continuously growing flood of data that is associated therewith, demand a profound and systematic reflection on the systematization and classification of biological data. This, however, demands robust theories of basic concepts such as kind, species, part, whole, function, process, fragment, sequence, expression, boundary, locus, environment, system, and so on. Concepts which belong to the implicit stock of knowledge of every biologist. They amount to a dimension of biological reality which remains constant in the course of biological evolution and whose theoretical treatment requires contemporary analogues of the tools developed in traditional Aristotelian metaphysics. To provide the necessary theories and definitions is a task for philosophy, which is thus called upon to play an important role as intermediary between biology and informatics.

The concept of niche (setting, context, habitat, environment) has been little studied by ontologists, in spite of its wide application in a variety of disciplines from evolutionary biology to economics. What follows is a first formal theory of this concept, a theory of the relations between objects and their niches. The theory builds upon existing work on mereology, topology, and the theory of spatial location as tools of formal ontology. It is illustrated above all by means of simple biological examples, but the concept of niche should be understood as being, like concepts such as part, boundary, and location, a structural concept that is applicable in principle to a wide range of different domains.

We begin by describing recent developments in the burgeoning discipline of applied ontology, focusing especially on the ways ontologies are providing a means for the consistent representation of scientific data. We then introduce Basic Formal Ontology(BFO), a top‐level ontology that is serving as domain‐neutral framework for the development of lower level ontologies in many specialist disciplines, above all in biology and medicine. BFO is a bicategorial ontology, embracing both three‐dimensionalist (continuant)and four‐dimensionalist (occurrent) perspectives within a single framework. We examine how BFO‐conformant domainontologies can deal with the consistent representation of scientific data deriving from the measurement of processes of different types, and we outline on this basis the first steps of an approach to the classification of such processes within the BFO framework.1.

The history of twentieth century philosophy is characterised by the gap between analytic and continental philosophy -- even though both have their roots in a tradition referred to as 'Austrian' or 'Central-European' philosophy. The essays in this volume show in historical and systematic studies, how a reassessment of this 'Central-European' tradition can build an interesting bridge between phenomenology and analytic philosophy and, thus, create a new foundation that allows for an original perspective on central problems of philosophy.

How are we to understand the intentionality of mental acts which lack existing objects? Two alternatives present themselves: the Meinongian, which would involve the postulation of special nonexistent objects; and the adverbial, which would appeal instead to special qualities of the acts themselves. The present paper, which draws on the hitherto neglected aesthetic writings of the Meinong school, is concerned with certain psychological and aesthetic implications of the adverbial approach. The 'substitution theory' of the title consists in the view that our experience of works of art can best be conceived in terms of special sorts of'modified' psychic phenomena which may be said to substitute or stand proxy for our normal emotional experiences. The job of the work of art, on this view, is precisely to bring about such proxy emotions within the psychic subject. This idea is shown to have imphcations for the treatment of aesthetic pleasure, as also for our understanding of the nature of artistic traditions and of the value of works of art.

Die Werke Kants oder Hegels sind geistige Denkmaler: Sie gehören zur Nationalliteratur, und die Verfasser von Editionen und Kommentaren zu diesen Werken betreiben insofern eine Art Denkmalpflege. In der Geschichte Englands oder in der des englischen Sprachraumes hat kein philosophisches Werk einen auch nur annähernd ähnlichen Status. Texte als solche ("klassische Texte" oder "Meisterwerke") spielen dementsprechend in der deutschen Philosophie eine viel wichtigere Rolle als bei den Angelsachsen, und etwas ähnliches gilt auch für das Kommentieren: Zu englischsprachigen philosophischen Werken gibt es nämlich keine Kommentarliteratur.

Technological developments have resulted in tremendous increases in the volume and diversity of the data and information that must be processed in the course of biomedical and clinical research and practice. Researchers are at the same time under ever greater pressure to share data and to take steps to ensure that data resources are interoperable. The use of ontologies to annotate data has proven successful in supporting these goals and in providing new possibilities for the automated processing of data and information. In this chapter, we describe different types of vocabulary resources and emphasize those features of formal ontologies that make them most useful for computational applications. We describe current uses of ontologies and discuss future goals for ontology-based computing, focusing on its use in the field of infectious diseases. We review the largest and most widely used vocabulary resources relevant to the study of infectious diseases and conclude with a description of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) suite of interoperable ontology modules that together cover the entire infectious disease domain.