Barry Smith and His Influence On (Not Only, But Mainly My) Philosophy

Autobiographical survey of interactions between the author and Barry Smith, especially as concerns the background and influence of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy and work on the relevance of Adolf Reinach, Roman Ingarden and other Central-European thinkers to contemporary analytic philosophy

Confluence: the Galician Origins of Polish Analytic Philosophy

Separate Austrian influences, those of Bolzano and Brentano, came together in the work of Kazimierz Twardowski, the founder of the Lvov–Warsaw School and Polish analytic philosophy. From Bolzano he took the ideas of abstract content and absolute truth; from Brentano the centrality of intentionality and the role of psychology, and from both an awareness of the historical depth of philosophy. These streams flowed together in and through him to form central doctrines, attitudes and practices of that School, from its origins in 1895 to its continuation in contemporary Polish philosophy

Trouble Up at t’Ontological Mill: An Inconclusive Dialog

Grenon and Smith (2004) propose a framework for the ontology of things in space and time involving and invoking the distinction between continuants and occurrents, which has become a key element of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). The terminology of SNAP (from “snapshot:” state of a continuant at a time) and SPAN (how an occurrent develops over an interval or timespan) occurs in that paper’s title. While any commonsense ontology will have a place for both continuants and occurrents, there is much room for philosophical debate on whether one of them is more basic than the other, or can be reduced to the other, or whether they are equally fundamental, or whether they are two different perspectives on the same reality. Grenon and Smith opt for the last of these. They call the accounts of continuants (SNAP) and occurrents (SPAN) both “ontologies.” They do not have a single ontology of all that is in space and time. This dialog throws a few of the common arguments around a bit and comes to no sure conclusion. But one of the characters bears a faint resemblance to a certain Buffalonian philosopher

COMPLIANCE TO QUALITY CRITERIA OF EXISTING REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION METHODS

In this article we define a requirements elicitation method based on natural language modelling. We argue that our method complies with synthesized quality criteria for RE methods, and compare this with the compliance of traditional RE methods (EER, ORM, UML). We show limited empirical evidence to support our theoretical argument.computer science applications;

Truth­-Makers

During the realist revival in the early years of this century, philosophers of various persuasions were concerned to investigate the ontology of truth. That is, whether or not they viewed truth as a correspondence, they were interested in the extent to which one needed to assume the existence of entities serving some role in accounting for the truth of sentences. Certain of these entities, such as the Sätze an sich of Bolzano, the Gedanken of Frege, or the propositions of Russell and Moore, were conceived as the bearers of the properties of truth and falsehood. Some thinkers however, such as Russell, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, and Husserl in the Logische Untersuchungen, argued that instead of, or in addition to, truth-bearers, one must assume the existence of certain entities in virtue of which sentences and/or propositions are true. Various names were used for these entities, notably 'fact', 'Sachverhalt', and 'state of affairs'. (1) In order not to prejudge the suitability of these words we shall initially employ a more neutral terminology, calling any entities which are candidates for this role truth-makers

Aviation’s Heartland: The Flying Farmers and Postwar Flight

In 1944 the National Flying Farmers organized at Stillwater, Oklahoma. The organization took advantage of aviation\u27s wartime growth to promote flight as an integral part of agricultural life that would modernize production, break down social barriers, and give farmers greater access to markets. It also built on aviation\u27s roots in the agricultural landscapes of the Midwest and Great Plains as well as the strategic role these spaces would come to play in the Cold War. In addition to giving farmers greater control over their land and work, flight was more broadly imagined to connect the agricultural heartland with consumers abroad, making the region the capital of the United States\u27 “aviation empire.” Although the Flying Famers failed to achieve their broader goals, the organization\u27s early history provides further evidence of the international scope of farm life in the postwar era

The Generic Checkout System Approach to Ground Checkout Systems

With the advent of the Space Station, Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle and other projects, NASA has been prompted to critique major ground checkout systems around KSC. This critique is being used as a basis for the development of a central set of functions which are common to all checkout operations throughout the program. A prototyping effort was started over a year ago to implement those central functions, this effort was called the Generic Checkout System(GCS) which, over the past year, has grown into a working model 1 for ground checkout systems. At the Twenty-Third Space Congress a paper was presented which outlined the rudimentary operations of the GCS. Since that time GCS has evolved into a state of the art checkout system which demonstrates flexibility and ease of use. The GCS system has been chosen as the architecture which will support the Partial Paylod Checkout Unit(PPCU), a new system to be installed in early 1990. The development of the GCS system was meant to also address several problems inherent in current checkout systems: lack of flexibility, poor user interfaces and the abscence of an upgrade path from obsolete hardware. The GCS seeks to solve these problems in ways which utilize high technology advances in computer hardware and software. These advances include the use of commercial UNIX operating system based computers which offer vendor independence and portability of software, the use of state of the art user interfaces offering high resolution graphics, mouse interfaces and the ability to create displays interactively without the need to generate code to drive them. The use of other high tech products is also apparent in the GCS such as the support for Artificial intelligence, relational data base technologies, ADA programming language, parallel processing, RISC technology architectures, optical storage media, Local Area Network Connectivity, commercial graphics packages, INMOS transputers and the latest microprocessor technologies. This paper will attempt to explore some of the facets of the GCS prototyping and development effort and mention the future plans for the architecture which has been developed

Over akteren - Een gesprek met Eric de Kuyper

Peter Delpeut: Ik denk dat er een aantal zaken zijn waarover we kunnen praten. In ieder geval over de vraag of je voor jezelf een methode hebt om met akteurs om te gaan, of die methode is gebaseerd op met amateurs werken of dat ook wat te maken heeft met het werken met zogenaamde beroepsakteurs ..... 02 01 129 143