Barry Smith

University at Buffalo
National Center for Ontological Research
  • University at Buffalo
    Department of Philosophy
    Biomedical Informatics
    Neurology
    Computer Science and Engineering
    Distinguished Professor, Julian Park Chair
  • National Center for Ontological Research
    Administrator
  • Università della Svizzera Italiana
    Institute of Philosophy (ISFI)
    Visiting Professor (Part-time)
University of Manchester
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1976
APA Eastern Division
CV
Buffalo, New York, United States of America
  •  364
    Wittgenstein und das ethische Gesetz
    In Dieter Birnbacher & Armin Burkhardt (eds.), Sprachspiel und Methode: zum Stand der Wittgenstein-Diskussion, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 191-211. 1985.
    Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt den Versuch dar, die normative Seite von Wittgensteins Frühwerk herauszuarbeiten und dabei an seinem Ansatz insofern Kritik zu üben, als gezeigt wird, wie sehr dessen Implikationen mit unseren üblichen ethischen Vorstellungen in Konflikt stehen. Die Arbeit hat aber auch einen etwas wohlwollenderen Aspekt: Sie versucht zu zeigen, wie Wittgensteins scheinbar widersinnige Ansichten so formuliert werden können, daß sie zumindest begreifbar erscheinen. Zu diesem Zweck b…Read more
  •  285
    A theory of Austria
    In Nyiri J. N. (ed.), From Bolzano to Wittgenstein: The Tradition of Austrian Philosophy, Hölder-pichler-tempsky. pp. 11-30. 1986.
    The present essay seeks, by way of the Austrian example, to make a contribution to what might be called the philosophy of the supranational state. More specifically, we shall attempt to use certain ideas on the philosophy of Gestalten as a basis for understanding some aspects of that political and cultural phenomenon which was variously called the Austrian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Danube Monarchy or Kakanien.
  •  275
    Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, II. Band, 1. und 2 (review)
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 27 (1): 199-207. 1986.
  •  515
    A Husserlian Theory of Indexicality
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 28 (1): 133-163. 1986.
    The paper seeks to develop an account of indexical phenomena based on the highly general theory of structure and dependence set forth by Husserl in his Logical Investigations. Husserl here defends an Aristotelian theory of meaning, viewing meanings as species or universals having as their instances certain sorts of concrete meaning acts. Indexical phenomena are seen to involve the combination of such acts of meaning with acts of perception, a thesis here developed in some detail and contrasted w…Read more
  •  917
    A relational theory of the act
    Topoi 5 (2): 115-130. 1986.
    ‘What is characteristic of every mental activity’, according to Brentano, is ‘the reference to something as an object. In this respect every mental activity seems to be something relational.’ But what sort of a relation, if any, is our cognitive access to the world? This question – which we shall call Brentano’s question – throws a new light on many of the traditional problems of epistemology. The paper defends a view of perceptual acts as real relations of a subject to an object. To make this v…Read more
  •  302
    The Ontology of Epistemology
    Reports in Philosophy 11 57-66. 1987.
    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
  •  429
    Einleitung zu Anton Marty, "Elemente der deskriptiven Psychologie"
    with Johann Christian Marek
    Conceptus: Zeitschrift Fur Philosophie 21 (53-54): 33-47. 1987.
    This essay is an introduction to a lecture course "Elements of Descriptive Psychology" delivered by Anton Marty in around 1903/04. Marty offered courses on descriptive psychology at regular intervals in the course of his career at the University of Prague. The content of these courses follows closely the ideas of Marty’s teacher Franz Brentano, though with some interesting divergences and extrapolations. The present work is a historical and systematic introduction to an extract from notes taken …Read more
  •  161
    The politics of national diversity
    with Wolfgang Grassl
    Salisbury Review 5 33--37. 1987.
    On the consequences of the interplay between the diversity of ethnic, national, cultural and linguistic groupings in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
  •  577
    Logic and formal ontology
    In 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
  •  438
    Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology. The Case of Emil Lask and Johannes Daubert
    with Karl Schuhmann
    Kant 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
  •  334
    Relevance, relatedness and restricted set theory
    In 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
  •  298
    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
  •  526
    Derrida degree: A question of honour
    with Hans Albert, David M. Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Keith Campbell, Richard Glauser, Rudolf Haller, Massimo Mugnai, Kevin Mulligan, Lorenzo Peña, Willard Van Orman Quine, Wolfgang Röd, Karl Schuhmann, Daniel Schulthess, Peter M. Simons, René Thom, Dallas Willard, and Jan Wolenski
    The 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.
  •  151
    Puntel on Truth, Or: Old Idealistic Wine in New Semantic Bottles
    Ethik Und Sozialwissenschaften 3 (2): 166-169. 1992.
  • Sachverhalt
    In Sachverhalt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. pp. 1002-1113. 1992.
  •  290
    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
  •  902
    The 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.
  •  338
    Filozofia austriacka i dziedzictwo Brentany
    Principia 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.
  •  993
    The Four Phases of Philosophy
    with Franz Brentano and Balazs M. Mezei
    Rodopi. 1994.
    Introduction and translation of “The Four Phases of Philosophy” by Franz Brentano.
  •  948
    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
  •  1749
    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.
  •  524
    Topological foundations of cognitive science
    In 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
  •  712
    More Things in Heaven and Earth
    Grazer 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
  •  118
    Ontologia epistemologii
    In 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
  •  180
    Textlig Œrbødighed
    Kritik 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
  •  70
    Editorial Preface
    with Tadashi Ogawa
    The 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
  •  433
    Dalla psicologia del giudizio all'ontologia dello stato di cose
    Discipline 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