Analytic Metaphysics (2024)
The Course
This course consists in an overview of central themes in analytic metaphysics viewed from a broadly realist perspective. We begin with a historical overview of analytic metaphysics and a discussion of general categories such as universals, particulars, processes, dispositions and functions. We then extend these general categories to specific areas such as social reality, documents and document acts, disease, money, and war. The course will be of interest not only to philosophers but also to those interested in ontological applications.
Department of Philosophy: Special Topics PHI 598. Registration number: 24232
Time: Tuesdays, 1-3:50pm, Spring 2016
Room: 141 Park Hall, UB North Campus
Instructor: Barry Smith
Office hours: Tuesdays, 12:15-1pm and by appointment via email to [1]
Recommended background reading
- R. Arp, B. Smith, A. D. Spear, Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology
- John R. Searle, Making the Social World
- E. J. Lowe, The Four Category Ontology
- Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Language
Schedule
February 2: Analytic Metaphysics: Introduction and Historical Background
Aristotle
- What's Wrong with Contemporary Philosophy?
- Austrian Philosophy
- Objects and Their Environments: From Aristotle to Ecological Ontology
- Pieces of a Theory
- Slides
- Video
February 9: Ontology of Deontic Entities
- Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology, Chapter 5
- Massively Planned Social Agency
- Document Acts and the Ontology of Social Reality
- John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality
- Slides Contents
- Video
February 16: Ontology of Deontic Entities (continued)
- Massively Planned Social Agency
- Slides
- Video
- See also materials here
February 23: Ontological Realism
- Individuals, Universals and Collections
- Fiat Objects
- Endurantist and Perdurantist Accounts of Persistence
- Slides
- Video
March 1: Material Entities and Process Profiles
- Classifying Processes: An Essay in Applied Ontology
- On Classifying Material Entities in Basic Formal Ontology
- Slides
- Video
March 8: Mind, Language, Intentionality, Emotions, Truth, and Aboutness
March 22: Document Acts
March 29: Money
- The Construction of Social Reality
- Money and Fictions
- Toward a Science of Emerging Media
- Slides
- Video
April 5: The Ontology of Classification
April 12: Organisms and Environments
- How to do biology across the Genome
- The central role of the Gene Ontology (GO) and Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO)
- The ontology of relations
- How to understand biological universals
- Aristotle's Theory of Definition
- The Logic of Biological Classification and the Foundations of Biomedical Ontology
- The ontology of biological taxa
- The niche
April 19: Debate with John Searle on Free-Standing Y-Terms
Grading and Related Policies and Services
All students will be required to take an active part in class discussions throughout the semester and to prepare a paper on some relevant topic. The paper should be submitted in a draft version on or before March 29, and in final form on or before May 3. A powerpoint version will be presented in class in one or other of the two closing sessions .
Your grade will be determined in three equal portions deriving from:
- 1. class participation (2.5% per class attended)
- 2. paper (3000 words; deadline for draft: March 29; deadline for final version: May 3)
- 3. class presentation (graded according to quality of powerpoint slides, quality of delivery, and quality of response to questions)
For policy regarding incompletes see here
For academic integrity policy see here
For accessibility services see here
