Barry Smith

Extraordinarily optimistic claims are made on behalf of OpenAI, Anthropic and their supporters as concerns the powers and potential of Large Language Models. These claims include the idea that the apparent ever expanding powers of LLMs will soon lead to an Arti-ficial General Intelligence comparable in its power to the intelligence of human beings. We move from there to address the consequences of the widespread assumption that AI already comes close to achieving this goal coupled with the underlying facts of the matter, which point to major limitations on what AI can achieve.

With the widespread use of vaccines in research and clinical settings, there is an urgent need to standardize vaccine representation, integrate information across diverse vaccine types, and support computer-assisted reasoning. Accordingly, we have since 2007 developed the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO), which aligns with the Basic Formal Ontology and adheres to OBO Foundry principles. VO models ontologically vaccines, vaccine components, vaccine immune responses, vaccine investigation studies and other vaccine-related topics. VO represents more than 10,000 vaccines targeting 289 infectious pathogens and cancers in humans and over 30 nonhuman animal species. VO provides mappings to external resources such as RxNorm, CVX, FDA, and USDA. Various VO use cases exist. VO facilitates vaccine standardization in resources such as the VIOLIN vaccine database, ImmPort, and the Vaccine Adjuvant Compendium (VAC). Semantic queries can be made to query VO. VO has been shown to enhance experimental and clinical vaccine data analysis and vaccine literature mining. Overall, VO standardizes vaccine modeling and representation and greatly supports vaccine AI research in the Semantic Web era.

Background Vaccines have the ability to induce a range of immune responses under different conditions, forexample stimulating the production of neutralizing antibodies to block pathogen entry or activating cytotoxic T cellsto eliminate infected cells. Many such immune responses have not been thoroughly examined and classified. TheVaccine Ontology (VO) is a community-based ontology in the domain of vaccinology. We here describe how VO isused to represent the variety of immune responses associated with vaccines, together with associated biomarkersand profiles. Results The VO differentiates ‘vaccination’ and ‘vaccine immunization.’The former is a process of administering avaccine in vivo; the latter is the outcome of vaccine induction of immune response. This distinction is critical forunderstanding both the procedure of vaccination and the resulting immune effects. VO also models and representsvarious vaccine-induced responses at multiple biological levels, including population, organism, organ/tissue, cell,and gene/protein levels. Such an approach captures the complexity of vaccine-induced immunity, from population-wide trend (for example: herd immunity) to molecular mechanisms. VO defines immune biomarkers as materialentities such as neutralizing antibodies that signify a humoral immune response, and IFN gamma that is indicativeof cell-mediated responses. Such biomarkers provide measurable indicators of the immune system’s functionalstate post vaccination, enabling robust evaluation of vaccine efficacy. VO classifies ‘immune response profile’ and‘correlated profile (or correlate) of immune protection’ as ‘process profiles,’ a class in the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO2.0). Immune response profiles, such as ‘Th1 (or Th2)-biased profile,’ can be induced by various vaccines and vaccineadjuvants. Different types of ‘correlated profile of immune protection’ are also identified, such as mechanistic and non-mechanistic correlates of immune protection. Conclusion The important immune-related terms for immune biomarkers, profiles, and responses are modeledontologically in VO together with their interrelations. The results support enhanced classification and analysis ofvaccine-induced immune responses and related biomarkers and immune profiles, leading to further understandingof the vaccine immune mechanisms and enhanced vaccine research and development.

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.