Dangerous ontologies: the ethos of survival and ethical theorising in international relations

The article responds to a recent call for a more systematic interrogation of the persistence of the dichotomous relation between ethics and International Relations. The addition of ethics into International Relations, it has recently been claimed, has left unquestioned the ethical assumptions encompassed in the ‘agenda’ of International Relations itself. Thus, the article examines the ethics implicit in the ‘agenda of IR’ and, in so doing, considers the condition of possibility for a movement beyond the dichotomy ‘ethics and IR’ and towards ‘an ethical International Relations’. To achieve this task the article calls for an understanding of ethics as ethos. It further illustrates how the ‘dangerous ontology’ of realist IR is discursively created through an exposition of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political. In this anarchical ontology of danger an ‘ethos of survival’ has come to be the relational framework through which the other is conceptually encountered as an enemy. Subsequently, the article considers what repercussions this ethos has for the reception of ethics into IR

A Semantic-Based Information Management System to Support Innovative Product Design

International competition and the rapidly global economy, unified by improved communication and transportation, offer to the consumers an enormous choice of goods and services. The result is that companies now require quality, value, time to market and innovation to be successful in order to win the increasing competition. In the engineering sector this is traduced in need of optimization of the design process and in maximization of re-use of data and knowledge already existing in the company. The “SIMI-Pro” (Semantic Information Management system for Innovative Product design) system addresses specific deficiencies in the conceptual phase of product design when knowledge management, if applied, is often sectorial. Its main contribution is in allowing easy, fast and centralized collection of data from multiple sources and in supporting the retrieval and re-use of a wide range of data that will help stylists and engineers shortening the production cycle. SIMI-Pro will be one of the first prototypes to base its information management and its knowledge sharing system on process ontology and it will demonstrate how the use of centralized network systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing

Towards a social ontology of market systems

Academic analyses of market systems are deeply divided. While economists tend to neglect the personal and sociological factors that shape the behaviour of market actors, sociologists tend to discount the possibility of a systematic analysis of the consequences of market interactions. Economists thus end up with unrealistic models of markets, and sociologists end up unable to explain the economic impact of markets. This paper outlines a project that aims to produce an analysis of markets that is both sociologically realistic and capable of explaining economic effects. The project will construct a realistic ontological analysis of market systems, developed using a critical realist methodology. Market systems, it will argue, are social structures that depend ontologically upon both human individuals and a number of normative institutions. These institutions tend to produce coordinated interactions between market actors, and these interactions underpin mechanisms that endow market systems with emergent causal powers. Different types of interactions underpin different market mechanisms, including mechanisms like those theorised by mainstream economists, but also others that they tend to neglect, and an adequate understanding of real-world markets depends on analysing these multiple mechanisms and how they interact. This will be a theoretical project in economic sociology, drawing on existing empirical work without conducting new empirical research. It will be focussed primarily on contemporary product markets in advanced capitalist economies, while selected historical and alternative contemporary models will be considered more briefly to illustrate both the historical specificity of the dominant contemporary model and the possibility of alternative types of market system

Towards an Ontological Modelling of Preference Relations

Preference relations are intensively studied in Economics, but they are also approached in AI, Knowledge Representation, and Conceptual Modelling, as they provide a key concept in a variety of domains of application. In this paper, we propose an ontological foundation of preference relations to formalise their essential aspects across domains. Firstly, we shall discuss what is the ontological status of the relata of a preference relation. Secondly, we investigate the place of preference relations within a rich taxonomy of relations (e.g. we ask whether they are internal or external, essential or contingent, descriptive or nondescriptive relations). Finally, we provide an ontological modelling of preference relation as a module of a foundational (or upper) ontology (viz. OntoUML). The aim of this paper is to provide a sharable foundational theory of preference relation that foster interoperability across the heterogeneous domains of application of preference relations

Ontological co-belonging in Peter Sloterdijk's spherological philosophy of mediation

(Winner of the 2017 Paragraph annual essay prize competition, on the theme of ‘Belongings’) This article examines the ontology and politics of Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres trilogy, focusing in particular upon the notion of microspherical enclosure explicated in the first volume of this series. Noting Sloterdijk's unusual alignment of his philosophy with media theory, three main contentions are put forward. Firstly, that Sloterdijk's reconfiguration of Heidegger's fundamental ontology represents a largely unacknowledged renunciation of the primacy of Being-towards-death in the authentic existence of Dasein, foregrounding instead an originary co-belonging between mother and child. Secondly, that Sloterdijk borrows from media theory a concern regarding the facticity of all communication, grounding philosophical discourse in the determinate locality of its origin, but does so while exalting a pre-natal communicative immediacy that would seem to disparage the everydayness of Dasein. Finally, that Sloterdijk's oft-justified scepticism regarding globalization often retreats into an anti-cosmopolitanism that, in its nostalgia for the comfort, security and immediacy of the matrixial co-belonging (and the various attempts by humans to replicate this enclosure), evinces a covert but potentially noxious politics of exclusion

Text-mining and ontologies: new approaches to knowledge discovery of microbial diversity

Microbiology research has access to a very large amount of public information on the habitats of microorganisms. Many areas of microbiology research uses this information, primarily in biodiversity studies. However the habitat information is expressed in unstructured natural language form, which hinders its exploitation at large-scale. It is very common for similar habitats to be described by different terms, which makes them hard to compare automatically, e.g. intestine and gut. The use of a common reference to standardize these habitat descriptions as claimed by (Ivana et al., 2010) is a necessity. We propose the ontology called OntoBiotope that we have been developing since 2010. The OntoBiotope ontology is in a formal machine-readable representation that enables indexing of information as well as conceptualization and reasoning.Comment: 5 page

Visualising product-service system business models

Copyright © 2014. Copyright in each paper in this conference’s proceedings is the property of the author(s). Permission is granted to reproduce copies of these works for purposes relevant to the above conference, provided that the author(s), source and copyright notice are included on each copy. For other uses, including extended quotation, please contact the author(s).The paper addresses the issue of how to visualise innovative business models at various stages of the design and development process. The focus is on a particular type of business model, defined Product-Service Systems (PSSs), characterised by an integrated product-service offering, but can be generalised to other business model innovations. The paper presents a visualisation system based on a formalised business model ontology and a set of visualisation tools, and discusses how it can be used to enhance internal and external communication and improve dialogue and co-design activities inside the company and with external stakeholders

Competition, consumerism, and the "Other". A philosophical investigation into the ethics of economic competition

This paper presents a philosophical discussion of the ethical foundations of economic competition, based in large part on Emmanuel Levinas's theory of exteriority and of responsibility for the "Other". The claim is that competition, notwithstanding its positive effects in terms of efficiency and innovativeness, ontologically neglects the "other-ness" of individuals. The fundamental factor in the neglect is the "consumerist" orientation of competitive capitalism through which even small price differences can cause large shifts in demand, so that many firms are choicelessly dependant on competitors' behavior. This analysis based on Levinas significantly deepens Frank Knight's seventy year-old ethical critique of competition.Competition; Consumer economics; Ethics; Philosophy of economics