by Raul Corazzon - e-mail: rc[at]ontology.co

Click on the image for the mobile version

For an overview see the Index of the Pages or the Alphabetical Index of the Philosophers: A-F - G-O - P-Z; you can also download the page as or see the Table of Contemporary Ontologists (click on the image to see the PDF file)

Change of Address: The site www.formalontology.it is now at www.ontology.co

Living Ontologists - Bibliographical Guide: R - S

Index of the Section "The Rediscovery of Ontology in Contemporary Thought"

• Table of Formal and Descriptivists Ontologists (PDF - from Bernard Bolzano to present time)

  Ontologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries (a selection of critical judgments about some of the greatest philosophers of the recent past)

  Living Ontologists (a list of authors with an interest in ontology, with synthetic bibliographies)

These pages will give some essential bibliographical information about some of the most important living ontologists; only a few titles will be cited for every author.

The Authors to which I devoted an entire page are marked with an asterisk (*)

INDEX

• William Rapaport
  
  
• Nicholas Rescher
  
  
• Gary Rosenkrantz
  
  
• Edmund Runggaldier
  
  
• Nathan Salmon
  
  
• Theodore Sider
  
  
• Peter Simons
  
  
• Barry Smith
  
  
• Brian Cantwell Smith (*)
  
  
• David Woodruff Smith
  
  
• Fred Sommers (*)
  
  
• John F. Sowa
  
  

William Joseph Rapaport

Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Buffalo, The State University of New York

INDEX

Books

1. Rapaport William J., "Intentionality and the structure of existence", 1976.
   Unpublished Ph. D. thesis; available at ProQuest Dissertation Express (order number 7701930).
   
   
2. Rapaport William J. Thought, language, and ontology. Essays in memory of Hector-Neri Castañeda. Edited by Orilia Francesco and Rapaport William J. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1998.

Articles

1. Rapaport William J., "Terence Parsons' "Nonexistent objects"," Noûs 19: 255-271 (1985).
   
   
2. Rapaport William J., "To be and not to be," Noûs 19: 255-271 (1985).
   "Since the mid-1970s, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Alexius Meinong and an attendant flurry of Meinong-inspired theories.' One of the pioneering efforts was Terence Parsons's 1974 article, "A Prolegomenon to Meinongian Semantics" (Parsons, 1974), which was followed by a series of articles in which he extended and elaborated his theory, culminating in his 1980 book, Nonexistent Objects (Parsons, 1980).
   The present essay is a critical and comparative study of Parsons's seminal and exciting work in this area, concentrating on the informal and formal versions of his theory as presented in his book.2 I begin with a discussion of the nature of intentional objects, their properties, and modes of predication as presented in Parsons's informal version of his theory. I argue that his view of objects does not adequately reflect our ordinary ways of speaking and thinking, and I defend Meinongian theories that recognize two modes of predication against Parsons's objections, which are based on his preference for two kinds of properties. I then consider Parsons's application of his theory to fictional objects, pointing out problems with his view that can be avoided by maintaining (contra Parsons) that no existing entities ever appear in works of fiction. I conclude with an outline of one of Parsons's formal versions of his theory, raising some questions and pointing out some difficulties and a curious consequence about modes of predication."
   
   
3. Rapaport William J., "Non-existent objects and epistemological ontology," Grazer Philosophische Studien 25/26: 61-95 (1986).
   "This essay examines the role of non-existent objects in "epistemological ontology" - the study of the entities that make thinking possible. An earlier revision of Meinong's Theory of Objects is reviewed, Meinong's notions of Quasisein and Aussersein are discussed, and a theory of Meinongian objects as "combinatorially possible" entities is presented."

Links

William J. Rapaport (University at Buffalo)

Nicholas Rescher

Nicholas Rescher Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh

INDEX

Books

1. Rescher Nicholas. The riddle of existence. An essay in Idealistic metaphysics. Washington: University Press of America 1984.
   
   
2. Rescher Nicholas. Process metaphysics. An introduction to Process philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press 1996.
   
   
3. Rescher Nicholas. Imagining irreality: A study of unrealized possibility. Chicago: Open Court Publishing 2003.
   
   
4. Rescher Nicholas. Metaphysics. The key issues from a Realistic perspective. Amherst: Prometeus Books 2005.
   
   

Articles

1. Rescher Nicholas, "American philosophy today," Review of Metaphysics 46: 717-745 (1993).
   
   

Links

Nicholas Rescher University of Pittsburgh)

Gary Rosenkrantz

Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

INDEX

Books

1. Rosenkrantz Gary. Haecceity. An ontological essay. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1993.
   
   
2. Rosenkrantz Gary. Substance among other categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994.
   With Joshua Hoffman
   
   
3. Rosenkrantz Gary. Substance: its nature and existence. New York: Routledge 1997.
   With Joshua Hoffman

Articles

1. Rosenkrantz Gary, "On objects totally out of this world," Grazer Philosophische Studien 25/26: 197-208 (1986).
   "The view that a possible world is an existing abstract object implies that all nonexistent possible individuals have a principle of individuation in terms of existing objects, properties, and relations. However, some individuals of this kind are totally out of this world both in the subjective sense that nobody in this world can pick them out, and in the ontological sense that they would neither be created by assembling or arranging existing bits of matter nor otherwise be generated by existing items. The only acceptable principle of individuation for such nonexistent possibles is that they are individuated by their unexemplified haecceities."
   
   
2. Rosenkrantz Gary, "The science of Being," Erkenntnis 48: 251-255 (1998).

Links

Gary Rosenkrantz (Curriculum vitae)

Ernst Runggaldier

Professor of Philosophy, Institut für Christliche Philosophie, Innsbruck

INDEX

Books

1. Runggaldier Edmund. Carnap's early Conventionalism. An inquiry into the historical background of the Vienna Circle. Amsterdam : Rodopi 1984.
   
   
2. Runggaldier Edmund. Grundprobleme der Analytischen Ontologie. Paderborn: Schöningh 1998.
   With Christian Kanzian.
   Translated in Italian by Sergio Galvan as: Problemi fondamentali dell'ontologia analitica - Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 2002

Articles

Links

Edmund Runggaldier (Unversity of Innsbruck)

Nathan Salmon

Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Santa Barbara

INDEX

Books

1. Salmon Nathan. Reference and essence. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1981.
   Second expanded edition: Amherst, Prometheus Books, 2005.
   
   
2. Salmon Nathan. Frege's puzzle. Cambridge: The MIT Press 1986.
   
   
3. Salmon Nathan. Metaphysics, mathematics, and meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005.
   Philosophical papers. Vol. I.
   
   

Articles

1. Salmon Nathan, "Existence," Philosophical Perspectives 1: 49-108 (1987).
   
   
2. Salmon Nathan, "Analiticity and apriority," Philosophical Perspectives 7: 125-133 (1993).
   
   
3. Salmon Nathan, "Nonexistence," Noûs 32: 277-319 (1998).

Links

Nathan Salmon (university of California)

Theodore Sider

Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University

INDEX

Books

1. Sider Theodore. Four-dimensionalism. An ontology of persistence and time. New York: Oxford University Press 2001.

Articles

Links

Ted Sider (Personal Web Site)

Peter Simons

Professor of Philosophy, Leeds University

INDEX

Books

1. Simons Peter. Parts. A study in ontology. New York: Oxford University Press 1987.
   
   
2. Simons Peter. Philosophy and logic in Central Europe from Bolzano to Tarski. Selected essays. Dordrecht : Kluwer 1992.

Articles

1. Simons Peter, "New categories for formal ontology," Grazer Philosophische Studien 49: 77-99 (1995).
   "What primitive concepts does formal ontology require? Forsaking as too indirect the linguistic way of discerning the categories of being, this paper considers what primitives might be required for representing things in themselves (noumena) and representations of them in a thoroughly crafted large autonomous multi-purpose database. Leaving logical concepts and material ontology aside, the resulting 32 categories in 13 families range from the obvious (identity/difference, existence/non-existence) through the fairly obvious (part/whole, one/many, sequential order) and the surprisingly familiar (illocutionary modes, mass/count, indexical/descriptive) to the controversial (moment/fundament, transparent/opaque) and the arcane (modes of class delimitation, taxonomic rank, aspects of designators). Any such list is speculative and tentative, but the test of this one will be in its implementation, a new departure for philosophical category theories."
   
   
2. Simons Peter, "Continuants and occurrents. I," Supplement to the Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society 74: 59-75 (2000).
   Abstract "Commonsense ontology contains both continuants and occurrents, but are continuants necessary? I argue that they are neither occurrents nor easily replaceable by them. The worst problem for continuants is the question in virtue of what a given continuant exists at a given time. For such truthmakers we must have recourse to occurrents, those vital to the continuant at that time. Continuants are, like abstract objects, invariants under equivalences over occurrents. But they are not abstract, and their being invariants enables us toinfer both their lack of temporal parts and that non-invariant predications about them must be relativized to times."
   
   
3. Simons Peter, "Identity through time and Trope Bundles," Topoi.An International Journal of Philosophy 19: 147-155 (2000).

Links

Peter Simons (Trinity College Dublin)

Barry Smith

SUNY Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics and Ontology

INDEX

Books

1. Smith Barry. Parts and moments. Studies in logic and formal ontology. Edited by Smith Barry. Munich: Philosophia Verlag 1982.
   Reprinted 2001.
   
   
2. Smith Barry. Handbook of metaphysics and ontology. Edited by Burkhardt Hans and Smith Barry. Munich: Philosophia Verlag 1991.
   Two volumes; reprinted 2001.
   
   
3. Smith Barry. Austrian philosophy. The legacy of Franz Brentano. La Salle: Open Court 1994.
   
   

Articles

1. Smith Barry, "The ontogenesis of mathematical objects," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 6: 91-101 (1975).
   
   
2. Smith Barry and Mulligan Kevin, "A framework for formal ontology," Topoi.An International Journal of Philosophy 3: 73-86 (1983).
   
   
3. Smith Barry, "The ontology of epistemology," Reports on Philosophy (Jagiellonian University) 11: 57-66 (1987).
   
   
4. Smith Barry. Austrian philosophy. The legacy of Franz Brentano. La Salle: Open Court 1994.
   
   
5. Smith Barry, "Formal ontology, common sense and cognitive science," International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 43: 641-667 (1995).
   
   
6. Smith Barry, "On substances, accidents and universals: in defence of a constituent ontology," Philosophical Papers 26: 105-127 (1997).
   
   

Links

Barry Smith (National Center for Ontological Research)

David Woodruff Smith

Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

INDEX

Books

1. Smith David Woodruff. Husserl and intentionality. A study of mind, meaning, and language. Dordrecht: Reidel 1984.
   With Ronald McIntyre
   
   
2. Smith David Woodruff. Husserl. New York: Routledge 2007.

Articles

1. Smith David Woodruff, ""Pure" logic, ontology, and phenomenology," Revue Internationale de Philosophie: 133-156 (2003).
   
   

Links

David Woodruff Smith (A bibliography compiled by Eddie Yeghiayan)

John Florian Sowa

Computer Scientist

INDEX

Books

1. Sowa John F. Conceptual structures. Information processing in mind and machine. Reading: Addison-Wesley 1984.
   
   
2. Sowa John F. Knowledge representation. Logical, philosophical, and computational foundations. Pacific Grove: Books Cole 2000.
   
   

Articles

1. Sowa John F., "Top-level ontological categories," International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 43: 669-685 (1995).
   "Philosophers have spent 25 centuries debating ontological categories. Their insights are directly applicable to the analysis, design, and specification of the ontologies used in knowledge-based systems. This paper surveys some of the ontological questions that arise in artificial intelligence, some answers that have been proposed by various philosophers, and an application of the philosophical analysis to the clarification of some current issues in AI. Two philosophers who have developed the most complete systems of categories are Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. Their analyses suggest a basic structure of categories that can provide some guidelines for the design of Al systems."
   
   
2. Sowa John F. Ontological categories. In Shapes of forms. From Gestalt psychology to phenomenology to ontology and mathematics. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999. pp. 307-340
   "Top-level categories of an ontology are derived from contrasting features that distinguish the entities of a subject domain. Each distinctive feature is associated with axioms that are inherited by every entity or category of entities that have that feature. A hierarchy of categories can then be derived as a lattice formed as a product of the fundamental distinctions. This paper develops such a lattice based on philosophical distinctions taken primarily from the theories of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead.
   1. Categories, distinctions, and axioms
   Ontology is the study of existence, of all the kinds of entities - abstract and concrete - that make up the world. It supplies the predicates of predicate calculus and the labels that fill the boxes and circles of conceptual graphs. Logic and ontology are prerequisites for natural language semantics and knowledge representation in artificial intelligence. Without ontology, logic says nothing about anything. Without logic, ontology can only be discussed and represented in vague generalities. Logic is pure form, and ontology provides the content. The most general categories of an ontology are the framework for classifying every thing else.
   Distinctions
   More fundamental than the categories themselves are the criteria for distinguishing categories and determining whether a particular entity belongs to one or another. Those distinctions are the basis for Aristotle's method of definition by genus and differentiae. Each distinction contributes a pair of primitive features or differentiae, and the conjugation of all the differentiae for all the genera or supertypes of a compound concept constitutes its definition.
   In his efforts to automate Aristotle's logic, Leibniz assigned a prime number to each primitive feature. Then he represented each composite concept by the product of the primes in its definition. Leibniz's method of combining primitives generates highly symmetric hierarchies called lattices. That symmetry, by itself, is not essential to an ontology, but it is an important guide to knowledge acquisition: every combination that is generated theoretically should be tested empirically to determine whether entities of that type happen to exist. If so, then the combinatorial method may predict new types of entities and aid in their discovery. If no entities of the predicted type are found, then the combinatorial method may aid in the discovery of axioms or constraints that rule out those combinations. In either case, the method helps to ensure completeness by directing attention to possibilities that may have been overlooked or by suggesting new scientific principles that explain their absence.
   (...)
   Philosophical foundations
   The last two great ontological system builders were Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, both of whom were also pioneers in the development of symbolic logic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although their logic has flourished, their ontologies have been neglected. Yet the ontologies of Peirce and Whitehead, when combined with logic, can serve as a foundation for AI knowledge representation and natural language semantics."

Links

John Sowa on Knowledge Representation

RELATED PAGES

Ontologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries

RELATED SITES

Three sites (currently under development) which will be devoted to studies on Ontology in Italian, French and German:

Teoria e Storia dell'Ontologia

Théorie et Histoire de l'Ontologie

Theorie und Geschichte der Ontologie

Mobile version of this site for phone and laptop users:

Theory and History of Ontology (Mobile version)

The PDF version of all the pages is also available:

Theory and History of Ontology (PDF version)