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256Sämtliche Werke: Textkritische Ausgabe in 2 BändenPhilosophia. 1989.The last decade has witnessed the beginnings of a remarkable convergence of Husserlian phenonenology and analytic philosophy of language, and the present volumes provide original and important texts of the phenomenological philosophy of language. Powerfully influenced by the writings of the early Husserl, Reinach fashioned Husserl’s ideas into a rigorous analytical methodology of his own, which he applied in particular to problems in logic and the theory of knowledge, and to the philosophies of …Read more
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720Strengths and Limitations of Formal Ontologies in the Biomedical DomainElectronic Journal of Communication, Information and Innovation in Health 3 (1): 31-45. 2009.We propose a typology of representational artifacts for health care and life sciences domains and associate this typology with different kinds of formal ontology and logic, drawing conclusions as to the strengths and limitations for ontology in a description logics framework. The four types of domain representation we consider are: (i) lexico-semantic representation, (ii) representation of types of entities, (iii) representations of background knowledge, and (iv) representation of individuals. W…Read more
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210On the Phases of ReismIn Arkadiusz Chrudzimski & Dariusz Łukasiewicz (eds.), Actions, products, and things: Brentano and Polish philosophy, Ontos. pp. 137--183. 2006.Kotarbiński is one of the leading figures in the Lvov-Warsaw school of Polish philosophy. We summarize the development of Kotarbiński’s thought from his early nominalism and ‘pansomatistic reism’ to the later doctrine of ‘temporal phases’. We show that the surface clarity and simplicity of Kotarbiński’s writings mask a number of profound philosophical difficulties, connected above all with the problem of giving an adequate account of the truth of contingent (tensed) predications. The paper will …Read more
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103Legal ontology and the problem of normativityThe Analytic-Continental Divide, Conference, University of Tel Aviv. 1999.Applied ontology is the attempt to put to use the rigorous tools of philosophical ontology in the development of category systems which can be of use in the formalization and systematization of knowledge of a given domain. In what follows we shall sketch some elements of the ontology of legal and socio-political institutions, paying attention especially to the normativity involved in such institutions. We shall see that there is more than one type of normativity, but that this fact that has ofte…Read more
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377Bodily Systems and the Modular Structure of the Human BodyArtificial Intelligence in Medicine (Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence 2780) 9 86-90. 2003.Medical science conceives the human body as a system comprised of many subsystems at a variety of levels. At the highest level are bodily systems proper, such as the endocrine system, which are central to our understanding of human anatomy, and play a key role in diagnosis and in dynamic modeling as well as in medical pedagogy and computer visualization. But there is no explicit definition of what a bodily system is; such informality is acceptable in documentation created for human beings, but f…Read more
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427The Theory of Value of Christian von EhrenfelsIn Reinhard Fabian (ed.), Christian von Ehrenfels: Leben und Werk, Rodopi. pp. 150-171. 1986.Christian von Ehrenfels was a student of both Franz Brentano and Carl Menger and his thinking on value theory was inspired both by Brentano’s descriptive psychology and by the subjective theory of economic value advanced by Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics. Value, for Ehrenfels, is a function of desire, and we ascribe value to those things which we either do in fact desire, or would desire if we were not convinced of their existence. He asserts that the needed theoretical …Read more
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1796On Luck, Responsibility and the Meaning of LifePhilosophical Papers 34 (3): 443-458. 2005.A meaningful life, we shall argue, is a life upon which a certain sort of valuable pattern has been imposed by the person in question - a pattern which involves in serious ways the person having an effect upon the world. Meaningfulness is thus a special kind of value which a human life can bear. Two interrelated difficulties face ths proposal. One concerns responsiblity: how are we to account for the fact that a life that satisfies the above criteria can have more meaning than a life with the sa…Read more
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173Ingarden versus Meinong o logice fikcjiIn Z. Muszyński (ed.), Z badań nad prawdą i poznaniem, Wydawnictwo Umc-s. 1998.: For Meinong, familiarly, fictional entities are not created, but rather merely discovered (or picked out) from the inexhaustible realm of Aussersein (beyond being and non-being). The phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, in contrast, offers in his Literary Work of Art of 1931 a constructive ontology of fiction, which views fictional objects as entities which are created by the acts of an author (as laws, for example, are created by acts of parliament). We outline the logic of fiction which is implie…Read more
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244The Ontology of Processes and Functions: A Study of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and HealthIn Sharing Knowledge through the ICF: 13th Annual North American WHO Collaborating Center Conference on the ICF, Niagara Falls, June 7, 2007, North American Who Collaborating Center. 2007.The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health provides a classification of human bodily functions, which, while exhibiting non-conformance to many formal ontological principles, provides an insight into which basic functions such a classification should include. Its evaluation is an important first step towards such an adequate ontology of this domain. Presented at the 13th Annual North American WHO Collaborating Center Conference on the ICF, 2007.
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505Modelling Principles and Methodologies: Relations in Anatomical OntologiesIn Albert Burger, Duncan Davidson & Richard Baldock (eds.), Anatomy Ontologies for Bioinformatics: Principles and Practice, Springer. pp. 289--306. 2008.It is now increasingly accepted that many existing biological and medical ontologies can be improved by adopting tools and methods that bring a greater degree of logical and ontological rigor. In this chapter we will focus on the merits of a logically sound approach to ontologies from a methodological point of view. As we shall see, one crucial feature of a logically sound approach is that we have clear and functional definitions of the relational expressions such as ‘is a’ and ‘part of ’.
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683Searle and De Soto: The New Ontology of the Social WorldIn Barry Smith, David Mark & Isaac Ehrlich (eds.), The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality, Open Court. pp. 35-51. 2008.Consider a game of blind chess between two chess masters that is recorded in some standard chess notation. The recording is a representation of the game. But what is the game itself? This question is, we believe, central to the entire domain of social ontology. We argue that the recorded game is a special sort of quasi-abstract pattern, something that is: (i) like abstract entities such as numbers or forms, in that it is both nonphysical and nonpsychological; but at the same time, (ii) through i…Read more
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6646Foundations of Gestalt Theory (edited book)Philosophia. 1988.In 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels published his classic paper "Über 'Gestaltqualitäten'", the first systematic investigation of the philosophy and psychology of Gestalt. Ehrenfels thereby issued an important challenge to the psychological atomism that was still predominant in his day. His paper not only exerted a powerful influence on the philosophy of the Meinong school, it also marked the beginning of the Gestalt tradition in psychology, later associated with the work of Wertheimer, Köhler and K…Read more
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400Boundaries: An essay in mereotopologyIn Lewis H. Hahn (ed.), Philosophy of Roderick Chisholm (Library of Living Philosophers), Open Court. pp. 534--561. 1997.Of Chisholm’s many signal contributions to analytic metaphysics, perhaps the most important is his treatment of boundaries, a category of entity that has been neglected, to say the least, in the history of ontology. We can gain some preliminary idea of the sorts of problems which the Chisholmian ontology of boundaries is designed to solve, if we consider the following Zeno-inspired thought-experiment.
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498The Question of ApriorismAustrian Economics Newsletter (1/2): 1-5. 1990.We defend a view according to which Austrian economics rests on what can most properly be called an Aristotelian methodology. This implies a realist perspective, according to which the world exists independently of our thinking and reasoning activities; an essentialist perspective, according to which the world contains certain simple essences or natures which may come together in law-like ways to form more complex static and dynamic wholes, and an apriorist perspective, according to which given …Read more
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1177On substances, accidents and universals: In defence of a constituent ontologyPhilosophical Papers 26 (1): 105-127. 1997.The essay constructs an ontological theory designed to capture the categories instantiated in those portions or levels of reality which are captured in our common sense conceptual scheme. It takes as its starting point an Aristotelian ontology of “substances” and “accidents”, which are treated via the instruments of mereology and topology. The theory recognizes not only individual parts of substances and accidents, including the internal and external boundaries of these, but also universal parts…Read more
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997HL7 RIM: An incoherent standardStudies in Health Technology and Informatics 124 (Proceedings of MIE 2006). 2006.The Health Level 7 Reference Information Model (HL7 RIM) is lauded by its authors as ‘the foundation of healthcare interoperability’. Yet even after some 10 years of development work, the RIM is still subject to a variety of logical and ontological flaws which have placed severe obstacles in the way of those who are called upon to develop implementations. We offer evidence that these obstacles are insurmountable and that the time has come to abandon an unworkable paradigm.
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1130Development of a Manufacturing Ontology for Functionally Graded MaterialsIn Francesco Furini, Rahul Rai, Barry Smith, Georgio Colombo & Venkat Krovi (eds.), Proceedings of International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE), . 2016.The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a large and continually evolving volume of information. The analysis, integration and management of such large volumes of data, typically stored in multiple independently developed databases, creates significant challenges for practitioners. There is a critical need especially for open-sharing of data pertaining to engineering design which together with effective decision support tools can enable innovatio…Read more
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1860Mach and Ehrenfels: The foundations of Gestalt TheoryIn Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 124-157. 1988.Ernst Mach's atomistic theory of sensation faces problems in doing justice to our ability to perceive and remember complex phenomena such as melodies and shapes. Christian von Ehrenfels attempted to solve these problems with his theory of "Gestalt qualities", which he sees as entities depending one-sidedly on the corresponding simple objects of sensation. We explore the theory of dependence relations advanced by Ehrenfels and show how it relates to the views on the objects of perception advanced…Read more
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473Ontologia i analiza logiczna rzeczywistościFilozofia Nauki 2 5-22. 1994.The author attempts to show how mereology, taken together with certain topological notions, can yield the foundations for future investigations in formal ontology. He also attempts to show how the mereological framework allows for the direct and natural formulation of a series of theses - for example pertaining to the concept of a boundary - which can be only indirectly formulated (if at all) in set-theoretic terms. The far-reaching ain of the present framework is to serve as a basis for a forma…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 |