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582Logic and formal ontologyIn J. N. Mohanty & W. McKenna (eds.), Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Textbook, University Press of America. 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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440Neo-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 In Daubert’s unpublished writings we find a series of reflections on Lask, and on Neo-Kantianism, which form the subject-matter of this paper.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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336Relevance, relatedness and restricted set theoryIn Georg Schurz & Georg Jakob Wilhelm Dorn (eds.), Advances in Scientific Philosophy, Rodopi. 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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298Le 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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534Derrida 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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151Puntel on Truth, Or: Old Idealistic Wine in New Semantic BottlesEthik Und Sozialwissenschaften 3 (2): 166-169. 1992.
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296The truth about fictionIn Kunst Und Ontologie: Für Roman Ingarden zum 100. Geburtstag, Rodopi. 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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916The 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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340Filozofia 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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1009The Four Phases of PhilosophyRodopi. 1994.Introduction and translation of “The Four Phases of Philosophy” by Franz Brentano.
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973Austrian 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
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1754Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences: Proceedings of the 16th International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg Am Wechsel, Austria 1993) (edited book)Wien: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky. 1994.Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.
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524Topological foundations of cognitive scienceIn Carola Eschenbach, Christopher Habel & Barry Smith (eds.), Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Graduiertenkolleg Kognitionswissenschaft. pp. 3-22. 1994.This is a revised version of the introductory essay in C. Eschenbach, C. Habel and B. Smith (eds.), Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Hamburg: Graduiertenkolleg Kognitionswissenschaft, 1994, the text of a talk delivered at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science in Buffalo in July 1994
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714More Things in Heaven and EarthGrazer Philosophische Studien 50 (1): 187-201. 1995.Philosophers in the field of analytic metaphysics have begun gradually to come to terms with the fact that there are entities in a range of categories not dreamt of in the set-theory and predicate-logic-based ontologies of their forefathers. Examples of such “entia minora” would include: boundaries, places, events, states holes, shadows, individual colour- and tone-instances (tropes), together with combinations of these and associated simple and complex universal species or essences, states of a…Read more
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118Ontologia epistemologiiIn W Kregu Filozofii Romana Ingardena, Pwn. pp. 111-119. 1995.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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184Textlig ŒrbødighedKritik 116 89-99. 1995.Works of philosophy written in English have spawned a massive secondary literature dealing with ideas, problems or arguments. But they have almost never given rise to works of ‘commentary’ in the strict sense, a genre which is however a dominant literary form not only in the Confucian, Vedantic, Islamic, Jewish and Scholastic traditions, but also in relation to more recent German-language philosophy. Yet Anglo-Saxon philosophers have themselves embraced the commentary form when dealing with Gree…Read more
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70Editorial PrefaceThe Monist 78 (1): 3-4. 1995.The topic of translation is in my view not only a linguistic problem, but also a problem in the philosophy of culture. In the lexicon of a foreign language we may find an unfamiliar word that designates an object that is unknown in the eyes of our own culture. Instruments employed in a religious ceremony of the Catholic church, for example, an “encensoir,”, “reposoir,”, or “ostensoir,” will have no corresponding word in the Japanese language. But you must translate words of this type if you wish…Read more
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433Dalla psicologia del giudizio all'ontologia dello stato di coseDiscipline Filosofiche 7 (2): 7--28. 1997.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…Read more
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132Dlaczego nie istnieje filozofia polskaFilozofia Nauki 5 (1): 5-15. 1997.The author raises the question why Polish philosophy (by which he means Polish analytical philosophy, or the philosophy of the Lvov-Warsaw School) differs so much from what is known as 'Continental philosophy'. He identifies and analyses the following factors which have influenced philosophical developments in Poland: socialism, the connection between philosophy and mathematics, the influence of Austrian philosophy, the peculiar role of K. Twardowski, and Catholicism. The article ends with an ap…Read more
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799The connectionist mind: A study of Hayekian psychologyIn Stephen F. Frowen (ed.), Hayek: Economist and Social Philosopher: A Critical Retrospect, St. Martin's Press. pp. 9-29. 1997.In his book The Sensory Order, Hayek anticipates many of the central ideas behind what we now call the connectionist paradigm, and develops on this basis a theory of the workings of the human mind that extends the thinking of Hume and Mach. He shows that the idea of neural networks is can be applied not only in psychology and neurology but also in the sphere of economics. For the mind, from the perspective of The Sensory Order, is a dynamic, relational affair that is in many respects analogous t…Read more
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694An Introduction to OntologyIn Donna Peuquet, Barry Smith & Berit O. Brogaard (eds.), The Ontology of Fields: Report of the Specialist Meeting held under the auspices of the Varenius Project, National Center For Geographic Information and Analysis. pp. 10-14. 1998.Analytical philosophy of the last one hundred years has been heavily influenced by a doctrine to the effect that one can arrive at a correct ontology by paying attention to certain superficial (syntactic) features of first-order predicate logic as conceived by Frege and Russell. More specifically, it is a doctrine to the effect that the key to the ontological structure of reality is captured syntactically in the ‘Fa’ (or, in more sophisticated versions, in the ‘Rab’) of first-order logic, where …Read more
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961Revisiting the Derrida affairSophia 38 (2): 142-169. 1999.My own philosophical interests led me to investigate the letter which Smith submitted to The Times, along with eighteen other signatures from renowned philosophers, each objecting to the honorary degree which Cambridge was about to award Jacques Derrida. While Smith's letter has been esteemed for sober defense of philosophy, it has also been viewed as rather notorious by Derrida and postmodern sympathizers. After having contacted Smith at the State University of New York at Buffalo, we ag…Read more
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209Zeno’s paradox for coloursIn O. K. Wiegand, R. J. Dostal, L. Embree, J. Kockelmans & J. N. Mohanty (eds.), Phenomenology of German Idealism, Hermeneutics, and Logic, Dordrecht. pp. 201-207. 2000.We outline Brentano’s theory of boundaries, for instance between two neighboring subregions within a larger region of space. Does every such pair of regions contain points in common where they meet? Or is the boundary at which they meet somehow pointless? On Brentano’s view, two such subregions do not overlap; rather, along the line where they meet there are two sets of points which are not identical but rather spatially coincident. We outline Brentano’s theory of coincidence, and show how he us…Read more
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724Urteilstheorien und SachverhalteIn Artur Rojszczak & Barry Smith (eds.), Satz und Sachverhalt, Academia Verlag. pp. 9-72. 2001.The dominant theory of judgment in 1870 was one or other variety of combination theory: the act of judgment is an act of combining concepts or ideas in the mind of the judging subject. In the decades to follow a succession of alternative theories arose to address defects in the combination theory, starting with Bolzano’s theory of propositions in themselves, Brentano’s theory of judgment as affirmation or denial of existence, theories distinguishing judgment act from judgment content advanced by…Read more
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193Dwa oblicza idealizmu: Lask a HusserlIn Andrjez J. Noras & Dariusz Kubok (eds.), Miedzy Kantyzmem a Neokantyzmem, Wydawnictwo Uniwersyteto Slaskiego. pp. 130-156. 2002.Neo-Kantianism is common conceived as a philosophy ‘from above’, excelling in speculative constructions – as opposed to the attitude of patient description which is exemplified by the phenomenological turn ‘to the things themselves’. When we study the work of Emil Lask in its relation to that of Husserl and the phenomenologists, however, and when we examine the influences moving in both directions, then we discover that this idea of a radical opposition is misconceived. Lask himself was influenc…Read more
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285The Measure of CivilizationsAcademic Questions 16 (1): 16-22. 2002.Is it possible to compare civilizations one with another? Is it possible, in other words, to construct some neutral and objective framework in terms of which we could establish in what respects one civilization might deserve to be ranked more highly than its competitors? Morality will surely provide one axis of such a framework (and we note in passing that believers in Islam might quite reasonably claim that their fellow-believers are characteristically more moral than are many in the West). Cri…Read more
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359La géométrie cognitive de la guerreIn Smith Barry (ed.), Les Nationalismes, Puf. pp. 199--226. 2002.Why does ‘ethnic cleansing’ occur? Why does the rise of nationalist feeling in Europe and of Black separatist movements in the United States often go hand in hand with an upsurge of anti-Semitism? Why do some mixings of distinct religious and ethnic groups succeed, where others (for example in Northern Ireland, or in Bosnia) fail so catastrophically? Why do phrases like ‘balkanisation’, ‘dismemberment’, ‘mutilation’, ‘violation of the motherland’ occur so often in warmongering rhetoric? All of t…Read more
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852Una breve historia de la teoría de los actos de hablaIn Jorge Gomez (ed.), Pragmatica: Desarrollos Teóricos y Debates, Edicion Abya-yala. pp. 13-82. 2002.Provides a survey of the development of speech act theory from Aristotle through Reid and Peirce to Edmund Husserl, Anton Marty, Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach, and finally to Austin and Searle. A special role is played by Husserl's theory of objectifying acts (meaning, roughly, acts of naming or stating) and of the efforts by his followers to extend this theory to cover phenomena such as questioning and commanding. These efforts culminated in the work of Adolf Reinach, who developed the first …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 |