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
  •  154
    Satz und Sachverhalt
    with Artur Rojszczak
    Academia Verlag. 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
  •  260
    Review of Die Philosophie Franz Brentanos (review)
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 11 194--199. 1980.
  • The benefits of realism: A realist logic with applications
    Applied Ontology. An Introduction 109--124. 2008.
  • The meaning of life
    with Berit Brogaard
    Mcmaster, Reservation X 31--40. 2000.
  •  135
    Towards Interoperability of Biomedical Ontologies - Report Number 07132
    with Mark Musen and Michael Schroeder
    In Towards Interoperability of Biomedical Ontologies, Schloss Dagstuhl-leibniz-zentrum Fuer Informatik. 2008.
    The meeting focused on uses of ontologies, with a special focus on spatial ontologies, in addressing the ever increasing needs faced by biology and medicine to cope with ever expanding quantities of data. To provide effective solutions computers need to integrate data deriving from myriad heterogeneous sources by bringing the data together within a single framework. The meeting brought together leaders in the field of what are called "top-level ontologies" to address this issue, and to establish…Read more
  •  1241
    Practical Knowledge: Outlines of a Theory of Traditions and Skills (edited book)
    with J. C. Nyíri
    Croom Helm. 1988.
    A series of papers on different aspects of practical knowledge by Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, J. C. Nyiri, Eva Picardi, Joachim Schulte Roger Scruton, Barry Smith and Johan Wrede.
  •  286
    Towards an Ontology of Mental Functioning (ICBO Workshop)
    with Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, Mark Jensen, and Kevin Mulligan
    In Janna Hastings, Werner Ceusters, Mark Jensen, Kevin Mulligan & Barry Smith (eds.), Proceeedings of the Third International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, . 2012.
  •  5
    Philosophy and political change in Eastern Europe (edited book)
    with János Kristóf Nyíri
    Hegeler Institute. 1993.
  •  11
    N. Martin and S. Pollard, Closure spaces and logic (review)
    History and Philosophy of Logic 17 176-177. 1996.
  • David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (review)
    History and Philosophy of Logic 2 (n/a): 150. 1981.
  • M. A. Notturno, Perspectives on Psychologism (review)
    History and Philosophy of Logic 12 (2): 249. 1991.
  •  7
    Liberal Education in a Knowledge Society (edited book)
    Open Court. 2002.
    Liberal education was once governed by a canon, a recognized body of knowledge considered essential for transmission from one generation to the next. These essays examine the plight of modern educational theory in a world trying to cope with information overload without the guidance of a canon. Contributors include Carl Bereiter, Gordon Wells, and James Miller.
  • Introduction: International Medical Informatics Association Working Group 6 and the 2005 Rome Conference
    with James J. Cimino
    Journal of Biomedical Informatics 39 (3): 249-251. 2006.
  •  208
    Controlled and uncontrolled English for ontology editing
    with Brian Donohue, Douglas Kutach, Robert Ganger, Ron Rudnicki, Tien Pham, Geeth de Mel, and Dave Braines
    Semantic Technology for Intelligence, Defense and Security 1523 74-81. 2015.
    Ontologies formally represent reality in a way that limits ambiguity and facilitates automated reasoning and data fusion, but is often daunting to the non-technical user. Thus, many researchers have endeavored to hide the formal syntax and semantics of ontologies behind the constructs of Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs), which retain the formal properties of ontologies while simultaneously presenting that information in a comprehensible natural language format. In this paper, we build upon pr…Read more
  •  196
    Ontology-based integration of medical coding systems and electronic patient records
    with W. Ceusters and G. De Moor
    IFOMIS Reports. 2004.
    In the last two decades we have witnessed considerable efforts directed towards making electronic healthcare records comparable and interoperable through advances in record architectures and (bio)medical terminologies and coding systems. Deep semantic issues in general, and ontology in particular, have received some interest from the research communities. However, with the exception of work on so-called ‘controlled vocabularies’, ontology has thus far played little role in work on standardizatio…Read more
  •  21026
    Ontology
    In Luciano Floridi (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Blackwell. pp. 155-166. 2003.
    Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ in this sense is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. But in recent years, in a development hardly noticed by philosophers, the ter…Read more
  •  170
    The most obvious varieties of mental phenomena directed to non- existent objects occur in our experiences of works of art. The task of applying the Meinongian ontology of the non-existent to the working out of a theory of aesthetic phenomena was however carried out not by Meinong by his disciple Stephan Witasek in his Grundzüge der allgemeinen Ästhetik of 1904. Witasek shows in detail how our feelings undergo certain sorts of structural modifications when they are directed towards what does not …Read more
  •  581
    On the Origins of Analytic Philosophy (review)
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1): 153-173. 1989.
    Analytic philosophers have until recently been reluctant to pursue historical investigations into the Central European roots of their own philosophical tradition. The most recent book by Michael Dummett, however, entitled Origins of Analytic Philosophy, shows how fruitful such investigations can be, not only as a means of coming to see familiar philosophical problems in a new light, but also as a means of clarifying what, precisely, ‘analytic philosophy’ might mean. As Dummett points out, the ne…Read more
  •  665
    Reinach’s essay of 1911 establishes an ontological theory of logic, based on the notion of Sachverhalt or state of affairs. He draws on the theory of meaning and reference advanced in Husserl’s Logical Investigations and at the same time anticipates both Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and later speech act theorists’ ideas on performative utterances. The theory is used by Reinach to draw a distinction between two kinds of negative judgment: the simple negative judgment, which is made true by a negative…Read more
  •  296
    Introduction
    with David Woodruff Smith
    In Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, . 1995.
    Husserl’s philosophy, by the usual account, evolved through three stages: 1. development of an anti-psychologistic, objective foundation of logic and mathematics, rooted in Brentanian descriptive psychology; 2. development of a new discipline of "phenomenology" founded on a metaphysical position dubbed "transcendental idealism"; transformation of phenomenology from a form of methodological solipsism into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity and ultimately (in his Crisis of 1936) into an ontology…Read more
  •  684
    Gestalt psychology
    In Edward Craig (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 51-54. 1998.
    The term ‘Gestalt’ was introduced into psychology by the Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels in an essay entitled “On ‘Gestalt-Qualities’” published in 1890. ‘Gestalt,’ in colloquial German, means roughly: ‘shape’ or ‘structure’ or ‘configuration’, and Ehrenfels demonstrates in his essay that there are certain inherently structural features of experience which need to be acknowledged in addition to simple tones, colours and other mental ‘atoms’ or ‘elements’. His essay thus initiated a …Read more
  •  455
    Explications vérifactionnistes
    Philosophiques 38 (1): 177-194. 2011.
    Le présent article est une tentative nouvelle d’articuler le rôle d’une théorie des vérifacteurs. Nous soutenons que la théorie de la vérifaction constitue une pierre angulaire dans une bonne méthodologie en métaphysique, mais que l’amalgame entre la théorie de la vérifaction et la théorie de la vérité a été responsable de certains excès associés aux approches vérifactionnistes dans la littérature récente. Nous montrons que la théorie de la vérifaction conserve son attrait comme instrument d’inv…Read more
  •  1186
    Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy
    In Smith W. Grassl and B. (ed.), Austrian Economics and Austrian Philosophy, Helm Croom. pp. 1-36. 1986.
    Austrian economics starts out from the thesis that the objects of economic science differ from those of the natural sciences because of the centrality of the economic agent. This allows a certain a priori or essentialistic aspect to economic science of a sort which parallels the a priori dimension of psychology defended by Brentano and his student Edmund Husserl. We outline these parallels, and show how the theory of a priori dependence relations outlined in Husserl’s Logical Investigations can …Read more
  •  159
    К непереводимости немецкой философии
    Logos. Anales Del Seminario de Metafísica [Universidad Complutense de Madrid, España] 5 124-139. 2000.
    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
  •  387
    Referent Tracking (RT) advocates the use of instance unique identifiers to refer to the entities comprising the subject matter of patient health records. RT promises many benefits to those who use health record data to improve patient care. To further the adoption of the paradigm we provide an illustration of how data from an EHR application needs to be decomposed in order to make it accord with the tenets of RT. We describe the ontological principles on which this decomposition is based in orde…Read more
  •  556
    Disputes over territory are a major contributing factor to the disruption of international relations. We believe that a cumulative, integrated, and continuously updated resource providing information about such disputes in an easily accessible form would be of benefit to intelligence analysts, military strategists, political scientists, and also to historians and others concerned with international disputes. We propose an ontology-based strategy for creating such a resource. The resource will co…Read more
  •  166
    Wahrmacher
    with Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons
    Swiss Philosophical Preprints. 2009.
    Als zu Beginn des Jahrhunderts der Realismus wieder ernst genommen wurde, gab es viele Philosophen, die sich mit der Ontologie der Wahrheit befaßten. Unabhängig von der Bestimmung der Wahrheit als Korrespondenzbeziehung wollten sie herausfinden, inwieweit zur Erklärung der Wahrheit von Sätzen besondere Entitäten herangezogen werden müssen. Einige dieser Entitäten, so zum Beispiel Bolzanos ‘Sätze an sich’, Freges ‘Gedanken’ oder die ‘propositions’ von Russell und Moore, wurden als Träger der Eige…Read more
  • Mach şi Ehrenfels. Fundamentele teoriei gestaltiste
    In C. Stoenescu & I. Tanasescu (eds.), Filosofia Austriacă, Pelican. 2005.
    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
  •  307
    Oncology ontology in the NCI Thesaurus
    with Anand Kumar
    Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 213-220. 2005.
    The National Cancer Institute’s Thesaurus (NCIT) has been created with the goal of providing a controlled vocabulary which can be used by specialists in the various sub-domains of oncology. It is intended to be used for purposes of annotation in ways designed to ensure the integration of data and information deriving from these various sub-domains, and thus to support more powerful cross-domain inferences. In order to evaluate its suitability for this purpose, we examined the NCIT’s treatment of…Read more