Barry Smith | SUNY: University at Buffalo (original) (raw)
Books by Barry Smith
In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for compu... more In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the field of applied ontology that is of particular relevance to biomedicine, covering theoretical components of ontologies, best practices for ontology design, and examples of biomedical ontologies in use.
After defining an ontology as a representation of the types of entities in a given domain, the book distinguishes between different kinds of ontologies and tax-onomies, and shows how applied ontology draws on more traditional ideas from metaphysics. It presents the core features of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), now used by over one hundred ontology projects around the world, and offers examples of domain ontologies that utilize BFO. The book also describes Web Ontology Language (OWL), a common framework for Semantic Web technolo-gies. Throughout, the book provides concrete recommendations for the design and construction of domain ontologies.
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A series of papers on different aspects of practical knowledge by Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Halle... more 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.
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Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, 1984
This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical ... more 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 ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science.
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Papers by Barry Smith
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Parts and Moments
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We are very pleased to have been able to work in the new and exciting area of Computing and Philo... more We are very pleased to have been able to work in the new and exciting area of Computing and Philosophy and with such a distinguished group of people from philosophy, computing, information and cognition and a number of related fields who met at the E-CAP conference at MDH University in Sweden in 2005 to pursue the search of the nexus in the liminal; in the first place through philosophical reflection, informed by scientific results. It was a memorable and inspiring meeting; and the resulting book which is a collection of selected papers from ...
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Research in Phenomenology, 1975
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Hayek: Economist and Social Philosopher, 1997
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Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1995
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Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1997
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Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1996
I shall presuppose as undefended background to what follows a position of scientific realism, a d... more I shall presuppose as undefended background to what follows a position of scientific realism, a doctrine to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question: 1. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions? One can answer this ...
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In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for compu... more In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the field of applied ontology that is of particular relevance to biomedicine, covering theoretical components of ontologies, best practices for ontology design, and examples of biomedical ontologies in use.
After defining an ontology as a representation of the types of entities in a given domain, the book distinguishes between different kinds of ontologies and tax-onomies, and shows how applied ontology draws on more traditional ideas from metaphysics. It presents the core features of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), now used by over one hundred ontology projects around the world, and offers examples of domain ontologies that utilize BFO. The book also describes Web Ontology Language (OWL), a common framework for Semantic Web technolo-gies. Throughout, the book provides concrete recommendations for the design and construction of domain ontologies.
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A series of papers on different aspects of practical knowledge by Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Halle... more 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.
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Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano, 1984
This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical ... more 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 ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science.
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Parts and Moments
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We are very pleased to have been able to work in the new and exciting area of Computing and Philo... more We are very pleased to have been able to work in the new and exciting area of Computing and Philosophy and with such a distinguished group of people from philosophy, computing, information and cognition and a number of related fields who met at the E-CAP conference at MDH University in Sweden in 2005 to pursue the search of the nexus in the liminal; in the first place through philosophical reflection, informed by scientific results. It was a memorable and inspiring meeting; and the resulting book which is a collection of selected papers from ...
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Research in Phenomenology, 1975
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Hayek: Economist and Social Philosopher, 1997
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Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1995
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Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1997
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Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1996
I shall presuppose as undefended background to what follows a position of scientific realism, a d... more I shall presuppose as undefended background to what follows a position of scientific realism, a doctrine to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question: 1. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions? One can answer this ...
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Choice Reviews Online, 1995
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Academic Questions, 2002
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The Review of Austrian Economics, 1994
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Salisbury Review, 1987
It is reported that Saint Stephen, first Apostolic King of Hungary, had advised his son Emmerich ... more It is reported that Saint Stephen, first Apostolic King of Hungary, had advised his son Emmerich that he should not spare to invite foreigners into the Kingdom. His grounds were that'unius linguae uniusque moris regnum imbecile et fragile esC: a kingdom with but one language and one custom is weak and fragile. This remark is, one notes, at odds with much recent conservative philosophical theorising. For the latter has tended to stress the virtues of social and institutional homogeneity-the virtues of the nation state as classically conceived ...
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Essays on Wittgenstein and Austrian philosophy, 2004
Building on the writings of Wittgenstein on rule-following and deviance, Kristof Nyiri advanced a... more Building on the writings of Wittgenstein on rule-following and deviance, Kristof Nyiri advanced a theory of creativity as consisting in a fusion of conflicting rules or disciplines. Only such fusion can produce something that is both intrinsically new and yet capable of being apprehended by and passed on to a wider community. Creativity, on this view, involves not the breaking of rules, or the deliberate cultivation of deviant social habits, but rather the acceptance of enriched systems of rules, the adherence to which presupposes ...
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Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, Oct 1, 1998
Die Philosophiegeschichte liefert verschiedene Ansatzpunkte für die Behandlung der Frage nach dem... more Die Philosophiegeschichte liefert verschiedene Ansatzpunkte für die Behandlung der Frage nach dem Wesen von sozialen Objekten. Auf der einen Seite gibt es holistische und realistische Ontologien des Sozialen. Fur Heidegger z. B. sind Menschen keine isolierten Individuen sondern durch Andere, durch Werkzeuge, durch Traditionen verstrickt in eine Mitwelt, die nur als Ganzes existiert. Eine holistische Auffassung des Sozialen findet man auch bei Wittgenstein, der soziale Institutionen als Teile der Naturgeschichte des ...
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Läntinen filosofia jakautuu kolmeen osaan: analyyttiseen filosofiaan, mannermaiseen filosofiaan j... more Läntinen filosofia jakautuu kolmeen osaan: analyyttiseen filosofiaan, mannermaiseen filosofiaan ja filosofianhistoriaan. Eikä niistä yksikään ole hyvällä tolalla. Analyyttinen filosofia suhtautuu epäilevästi filosofian tieteellisyyteen, eikä se siksi välitä tosimaailmasta. Mannermainen filosofointi ei koskaan ole kunnollisen teoreettista, ja se räätälöidään jo ennakolta sopimaan erinäisiin poliittisiin ja eettisiin johtopäätöksiin. Filosofianhistoriaa tutkitaan lähinnä alueellisista lähtökohdista: tutkimuskohde määräytyy sen mukaan, mihin kansallisuuteen tai kulttuuriin filosofi lukeutuu, ei niinkään hänen työnsä objektiivisen arvon perusteella. Vain välttämällä nämä sudenkuopat voidaan filosofiassa saavuttaa edistystä.
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2000
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in S. C. Hirtle and A. U. Frank (eds.), Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS. Proceedings of the Third International Conference, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1997
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Formal Ontology in Information Systems SHARE (ed.) Nicola Guarino , 1998
This paper is concerned with certain ontological issues in the foundations of geographic represen... more This paper is concerned with certain ontological issues in the foundations of geographic representation. It sets out what these basic issues are, describes the tools needed to deal with them, and draws some implications for a general theory of spatial representation. Our approach has ramifications in the domains of mereology, topology, and the theory of location, and the question of the interaction of these three domains within a unified spatial representation theory is addressed. In the final part we also consider the idea of non-standard geographies, which may be associated with geography under a classical conception in the same sense in which non-standard logics are associated with classical logic.
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The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a larg... more 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 innovation. We believe that ontology applied to engineering (OE) represents a viable strategy for the alignment, reconciliation and integration of diverse and disparate data. The scope of OE includes: consistent capture of knowledge pertaining to the types of entities involved; facilitation of cooperation among diverse group of experts; more effective ongoing curation, and update of manufacturing data; collaborative design and knowledge reuse. As an illustrative case study we propose an ontology focused
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The development of manufacturing technologies for new materials involves the generation of a larg... more 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 innovation. We believe that ontology applied to engineering (OE) represents a viable strategy for the alignment, reconciliation and integration of diverse and disparate data. The scope of OE includes: consistent capture of knowledge pertaining to the types of entities involved; facilitation of cooperation among diverse group of experts; more effective ongoing curation, and update of manufacturing data; collaborative design and knowledge reuse. As an illustrative case study we propose an ontology focused
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Open Science Foundation, 2020
The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) is a suite of interoperable ontology modules that aims to p... more The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) is a suite of interoperable ontology modules that aims to provide coverage of all aspects of the infectious disease domain, including biomedical research, clinical care, and public health. IDO Core is designed to be a disease and pathogen neutral ontology, covering just those types of entities and relations that are relevant to infectious diseases generally. IDO Core is then extended by a collection of ontology modules focusing on specific diseases and pathogens. In this paper we present applications of IDO Core within various areas of infectious disease research, together with an overview of all IDO extension ontologies and the methodology on the basis of which they are built. We also survey recent developments involving IDO, including the creation of IDO Virus, the Coronaviruses Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO) and an extension of CIDO focused on COVID-19, IDO-CovID-19. We also discuss how these ontologies might assist in information-driven efforts to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate data discovery in the early stages of future pandemics and to promote reproducibility of infectious disease research.
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