Barry Smith

Despite the importance of human blood to clinical practice and research, hematology and blood transfusion data remain scattered throughout a range of disparate sources. This lack of systematization concerning the use and definition of terms poses problems for physicians and biomedical professionals. We are introducing here the Blood Ontology, an ongoing initiative designed to serve as a controlled vocabulary for use in organizing information about blood The paper describes the scope of the Blood Ontology, its stage of development and some of its anticipated uses.

Kristof Nyiri ha difeso per anni una concezione della conoscenza, della comunicazione e della tradizione che attribuisce un ruolo centrale a immagini di differenti tipi. Mentre il discorso e la scrittura sono in un certo senso lineari (o per meglio dire unidimensionali rispettivamente nel tempo e nello spazio), le immagini sono multidimensionali, e agli occhi di Nyiri questo conferisce loro un grande potere. Una sequenza di immagini — per esempio le immagini mostrate nelle vetrate di una cattedrale medievale, o in un repertorio di strutture di molecole proteiche — è un portatore naturale di significato che permette di veicolare messaggi di una considerevole complessità, che va ben oltre quel che potrebbe essere ottenuto con il solo discorso o con una sua trascrizione lineare.

La teoria degli atti linguistici tratta dei modi nei quali le persone usano le parole e le frasi nel discorso pubblico. Esse fanno ciò, familiarmente, non solo per trasmettere informazioni, ma anche per diversi altri propositi: dal ringraziare e ammonire al promettere e allo scusarsi. Nel suo libro Il mistero del capitale (2000), l'economista peruviano Hernando de Soto fornisce una spiegazione dello sviluppo della civiltà moderna nella quale i documenti giocano un ruolo centrale. In quanto segue, io presento i primi rudimenti di una teoria di quelli che chiamo atti documentali — atti nei quali le persone usano documenti non solo per registrare informazioni, ma anche per conseguire una pluralità di ulteriori finalità, quindi ampliando la portata di quello che gli esseri umani possono ottenere attraverso il semplice compimento di atti linguistici.

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.

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.