Barry Smith

I use the technical term ‘agglomeration’in what follows to designate those totalities of entities that a divide–in the sense that is of concern to us here–divides. Examples of agglomerations in this sense are the Afrikaaner in South Africa, the Song Dynasty, the Russian army. Divides are then a phenomenon akin to traditional boundaries, for example between nations. But as I have attempted to illustrate in Smith (1997a; 1999a), the divide–agglomeration relation takes many different forms which go beyond those we are accustomed to dealing with in the realm of post-Westphalian national borders. As is well known, the analytic/Continental divide had its roots in an opposition between two kinds of activities emanating, respectively, in the English-speaking world on the one hand and in the German-speaking world on the other. One is reminded here of the famous passage in Dummett’s book Origins of Analytic Philosophy–which Ferraris himself cites in his most recent book Hysteresis (2023) 2–to the effect that although Frege and Husserl were founders of two radically different philosophical movements, they would have appeared in 1903 to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both ‘as remarkably close in orientation’.

Recent advances in robotics and machine learning have revived the idea of police robots – machines that could patrol public spaces, conduct traffic stops, and interact with citizens with near-human competence. Proponents emphasize potential gains in officer safety, operational efficiency, and consistent rule enforcement, and international policy discussions increasingly treat AI and robotics for law enforcement as an emerging reality rather than science fiction. This paper offers a philosophically grounded argument for a strong infeasibility thesis: police robots that are like humans or almost like humans in the core social dimensions of open-ended policing cannot be built. The claim is not that robots cannot assist police work, or even replace officers in some narrowly specified tasks, but that they cannot become role-equivalent agents in situations requiring socially heterogeneous interaction, discretionary norm application, and accountable coercive authority. We draw here on our work on the limits of Artificial Intelligence documented in Landgrebe and Smith (2025; hereafter L&S) and applied to the case of robot cops in (Smith 2021). L&S develop a critique of AI in dialogue, social norms, and moral behavior emulation, and they explore the implications of this critique for current interdisciplinary scholarship on policing legitimacy, discretion, accountability, and machine ethics. We argue that human-like police work depends on intersubjective understanding, context-sensitive norm application, and a facility for holistic moral judgment in dynamic behavior settings. These capacities are not merely engineering challenges; they violate inherent limits to both stochastic and neurosymbolic AI models, and they also expose structural gaps in data, modeling, and responsibility attribution that would persist even under optimistic assumptions about future AI.

Philosophy in the German-speaking world can usefully be divided into two distinct traditions, which we might refer to as the German and the Austrian (or Austro-Hungarian) traditions, respectively. The main line of the first begins with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling and ends with Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), and Ernst Bloch. The main line of the second, which embraces the philosophy of Prague, Lemberg (now Lvov), and Cracow as much as that of Vienna and Graz, begins with Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848), Ernst Mach (1838-1916), and Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), and ends with Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951 ), Otto Neurath (1882-1945), and Karl Popper ( 1909-1994).

Die Werke Kants oder Hegels sind geistige Denkmaler: Sie gehören zur Nationalliteratur, und die Verfasser von Editionen und Kommentaren zu diesen Werken betreiben insofem eine Art Denkmalpflege. Kein philosophisches Werk hat einen auch nur annähernd ähnlichen Status in der Geschichte Englands oder in der des englischen Sprachraums. 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 fiir das Kommentieren. Zu englischsprachigen philosophischen Werken gibt es nämlich keine Kommentarliteratur.

There is an old problem in philosophy: the problem of how we pass from the mental theater of our representations to the external realm of concrete physical objects. This problem arises against the background of representationalist theories of the relation between mind and its objects which are marked by the following three features: 1. The perceiving subject is idealized. It is conceived as lying outside any context or environment and in abstraction from any goal-directed behavior. 2. Perception is seen as beginning with raw or bare sensations. Then, by a process of inference, there arise beliefs about external physical objects. 3. Physical objects are assumed to be out there in the world, but to be inaccessible to direct experience. This representationalist theory lives on in the computational theories of the mind and in the doctrines of methodological solipsism embraced by contemporary cognitive scientists. But by making perception dependent on sensation, and by making sensations the direct objects of experience, it has matters exactly upside down. The paper draws on the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson and Roger Barker in order to provide the metaphysical principles of a more adequate theory.

Imagine a 5-stone weakling whose brain has been loaded with all the knowledge of a champion tennis player. He goes to serve in his first match – Wham! – His arm falls off. The 5-stone weakling just doesn’t have the bone structure or muscular development to serve that hard. There are, clearly, different types of knowledge/ability/skill, only some of which are a matter of what can be transferred simply by passing signals down a wire from one brain (or computer) to another. Sometimes it is the body (the hardware) which knows.

The last two decades have seen considerable efforts directed towards making Electronic Health Records interoperable through improve¬ments in medical ontologies, terminologies and coding systems. Unfortunately, these efforts have been hampered by a number of influential ideas inherited from the work of Eugen Wüster, the father of terminology standardization and the founder of ISO TC 37. We here survey Wüster’s ideas – which see terminology work as being focused on the classification of concepts in people’s minds – and we argue that they serve still as the basis for a series of influential confusions. We argue further that an ontology based unambiguously, not on concepts, but on the classification of entities in reality can, by removing these confusions, make a vital contribution to ensuring the interoperability of coding systems and healthcare records in the future.