Barry Smith

What makes for a meaningful life here on earth. Happiness, some will say. But suppose you can have all the happiness you want by taking special pills or drinking just the right amounts of vodka? Would that make your life meaningful life? An alternative answer is love. But falling in love, wonderful though it may be, is just an event, a threshold between two phases of your existence, and it is, we argue, how you and your loved one shape your new lives together that matters for meaningfulness, and this means that you each still need to decide what to do next with your lives. Knowledge, for similar reasons, does not make a life worth living. Imagine that you could take a pill and immediately become as knowledgeable as the world’s leading expert in quantum mechanics. You would still need to decide what to do with your new-found knowledge. And similarly if you suddenly become very rich: you would still need to work out what to do with your new-found riches. A meaningful life, I argue, is in first approximation a life upon which some sort of pattern has been imposed -- a pattern which relates not merely to what goes on inside your head but which involves also, in serious ways, your having an effect upon the world. Aquinas, Beethoven, Copernicus, Dante, Edison all led meaningful lives, according to this criterion, because in giving shape to their own lives they also shaped the world around them.

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.

Vor genau zwei Jahren habe ich auf der damaligen Bonner Heidegger-Gedächtnis-Tagung der Humboldt-Stiftung einen Vortrag “Über die Nichtübersetzbarkeit der deutschen Philosophie” gehalten, dessen Inhalt sich mit meinem heutigen Vortrag vielfach überschneidet. Meine These war damals die, daß gewisse Formen des philosophischen Schreibens und Sprechens dadurch bestimmt sind, daß sie zu Ergebnissen führen, die eine Ähnlichkeit mit gewissen poetischen und religiösen Texten aufweisen, in dem Sinn, daß sie absichtlich den Rahmen des bisher bestehenden Sprachgebrauchs sprengen. Ursprünglich vor allem bei deutschen und neuerdings in einem noch erheblicheren Maß bei gewissen französischen Philosophen sind derartige Absichten nachweisbar. Bei englischsprachigen Philosophen dagegen spielen sie gar keine Rolle, es sei denn, daß diese Philosophen zu Gruppierungen gehören, die sich durch die deutsche oder französische Philosophie inspirieren lassen.

The essay is divided into four main parts: the first sketches basic dichotomy of substances (objects, things, persons), on the one hand, and accidents (events, qualities, actions) at the heart of Aristotelian ontology. The second outlines some of the subtypes falling under these two headings. The third concerns the Aristotelian ontology of what is extended in space, including in particular a sketch of Aristotle’s theory of places. The fourth and final part then goes beyond Aristotle to give an account of the ontology of the environments which constitute the everyday world of human action.

We assume a position of scientific realism to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question: 1. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions? One can answer this question with either a 'yes' or a 'no'. 'No' is the preferred answer of most contemporary methodologists – Murray Rothbard is one distinguished counterexample to this trend – who maintain that empirical theories are completely free of non-empirical ('a priori') admixtures and who see science as a matter of the gathering of pure 'data' obtained through simple observation. From such data scientific propositions are then supposed to be somehow capable of being established.

You might think that Kraus's single-minded devotion to the task of draining the swamp of journalistic phrasemaking was somewhat exaggerated. Surely journalism cannot be so bad or so important that one should devote 40 years of one's life to attacking it. Kraus was not, however, interested in individual acts of misusing language on the part of individual journalists. Rather, he took examples of the misuse of language as illustrative phenomena, as exemplars. He was concerned to root out a certain metaphysical duplicity, a lack of fit between language and thought, whereby Kraus himself would serve as judge, trying Viennese journalism under the law that is the grammar of the German language itself. Hitler caused Kraus to go linguistically mad. The issue of _Die Fackel_ that appeared after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany is unintelligible. It consists of a 300-page essay on "Why _Die Fackel_ does not appear."

There is a frequently recurring clinical phenomenon, familiar to those who work with adolescents, which is sometimes called "Pascal's syndrome." The syndrome affects a significant fraction of adolescents who, in striving to establish themselves as fully independent, adult selves, pass through a phase in which they make utterances such as "Reality does not exist,'' "The world is a gigantic conspiracy directed against me personally,'' "Only I have a clear understanding of what the world is like; all others (and especially my parents, teachers, politicians, etc.) are deluded," and so forth. Pascal's syndrme is, fortunately, a transient affliction; it is a mercifully short-lived phase in the lives of the vast majority of affected individuals. There are, however, some -- including some philosophers -- who never grow out of it.

Často sa poukazuje na to, že rakúska ekonomická škola je vystavaná na základe, ktorý by sme mohli najvhodnejšie nazvať ako aristotelovská metodológia. Teda rakúski ekonómovia si typicky osvojujú realistickú perspektívu, tvrdiac, že svet jestvuje nezávisle od nášho (t.j. ľudského) myslenia a našej argumentácie. Ďalej tvrdia, že svet obsahuje isté jednoduché esencie alebo povahové vlastnosti, ktoré je možné nahliadnuť ako zákonitosti vytvárajúce komplexnejšie statické či dynamické celky. Ďalej tvrdia, že tieto esencie alebo esenciálne štruktúry sú pochopiteľné, v tom zmysle, že vedec ich môže neinduktívne uchopiť pomocou teórie, veľmi podobne tomu ako uchopujeme rozdiel medzi červenou a zelenou farbou, kružnicou a štvorcom, výstražným posunkom a pochvalou, a podobne.