Ontology Laying The Foundations

It is no exaggeration to say that of the early 20th century German philosophers who claimed to establish a new ontology, former neo-Kantian turned realist Nicolai Hartmann is the only one to have actually followed through. "Ontology: Laying the Foundations" deals with "what is insofar as it is," and its four parts tackle traditional ontological assumptions and prejudices and traditional categories such as substance, thing, individual, whole, object, and phenomenon; a novel redefinition of existence and essence in terms of the ontological factors Dasein and Sosein and their interrelations; an analysis of modes of "givenness" and the ontological embeddedness of cognition in affective transcendent acts; and a discussion of the status of ideal being, including mathematical being, phenomenological essences, logical laws, values, and the interconnections between the ideal and real spheres. Hartmann’s work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy. Hartmann’s work offers rich resources for those interested in overcoming the human-centeredness of much 20th century philosophy.

This posthumous work by Gustav Bergmann was essentially complete before his death in 1987. In it, he proposes a systematic ontological system that would account for all the basic areas of human thought and experience within an extended framework of logical atomism. Bergmann's approach to traditional problems of ontology seeks to balance the competing demands of phenomenology, which emphasizes the reality presented to us by experience, and of metaphysics, which delineates the most general kinds of existents given in experience and the most general kinds of relationships they bear to one another. Beginning with atomic facts composed of phenomenally presented qualities, Bergmann goes on to develop an ontology that can account for the ordinary objects of everyday experience, the mental states through which we become aware of and acquire knowledge of these objects, and even the truths of logic and mathematics that allow us to extend our thought and discourse about ordinary objects beyond what may be phenomenally apparent. Many ontologists will be particularly interested in the attention Bergmann pays to the concept of logical form. In his earlier works, Bergmann claimed that "the form of the world is in the world"; the "fact" that a thing or a complex has a certain logical or syntactic form, he argued, is itself one more fact of our experienced reality, rather than a contribution of the mind or of linguistic conventions. Critics of this claim have suggested that paradoxes and contradictions result from it. In New Foundations of Ontology Bergmann responds, arguing that his concept of logical form does not necessarily create the problems noted in earlier critiques.

The use of ontologies for data and knowledge organization has become ubiquitous in many data-intensive and knowledge-driven application areas, in science, industry, and the humanities. At the same time, ontology engineering best practices continue to evolve. In particular, modular ontology modeling based on ontology design patterns is establishing itself as an approach for creating versatile and extendable ontologies for data management and integration. This book is the very first comprehensive treatment of Ontology Engineering with Ontology Design Patterns. It contains both advanced and introductory material accessible for readers with only a minimal background in ontology modeling. Some introductory material is written in the style of tutorials, and specific chapters are devoted to examples and to applications. Other chapters convey the state of the art in research regarding ontology design patterns. The editors and the contributing authors include the leading contributors to the development of ontology-design-pattern-driven ontology engineering.

Formal ontology as a main branch of metaphysics investigates categories of being. In the formal ontological approach to metaphysics, these ontological categories are analysed by ontological forms. This analysis, which the Element illustrates by some category systems, provides a tool to assess the clarity, exactness and intelligibility of different category systems or formal ontologies. It discusses critically different accounts of ontological form in the literature. Of ontological form, the authors propose a character-neutral relational account. In this metatheory, ontological forms of entities are their standings in internal relations whose holding is neutral on the character of their relata. These relations are 'formal ontological relations'. The Element concludes by showing that our metatheory is useful for understanding categorial fundamentality/non-fundamentality, different formal ontologies, and for unifying metaphysical questions. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The eminent philosopher delivers an illuminating interpretation of Kant’s magnum opus in what is itself a significant work of Western philosophy. The text of Martin Heidegger’s 1927–28 university lecture course on Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason presents a close interpretive reading of the first two parts of this masterpiece of modern philosophy. In this course, Heidegger continues the task he enunciated in Being and Time as the problem of dismantling the history of ontology, using temporality as a clue. Heidegger demonstrates that the relation between philosophy, ontology, and fundamental ontology is rooted in the genesis of the modern mathematical sciences. He also shows that objectification of beings as beings is inseparable from knowledge a priori, the central problem of Kant’s Critique. He concludes that objectification rests on the productive power of imagination, a process that involves temporality, which is the basic constitution of humans as beings.

Religiosity and spirituality (R/S) represent a very important factor of daily life for many individuals across different cultures and contexts. It is associated with lower rates of depression, suicide, mortality, and substance abuse, and is positively correlated with well-being and quality of life. Despite growing academic recognition and scientific literature on these connections this knowledge has not been translated into clinical practice. Part of the expanding Oxford Cultural Psychiatry series, Spirituality and Mental Health Across Cultures is a timely exploration of the implications of R/S on mental health. Written and edited by 38 experts in the fields of spirituality and mental health from 11 countries, covering a wide range of cultural and geographical perspectives, this unique resource assesses how mental health relates to world religions, agnosticism, atheism, and spiritualism unaffiliated with organised religion, with a practical touch. Across 25 chapters, this resource provides readers with a succinct and trustworthy review of the latest research and how this can be applied to clinical care. The first section covers the principles and fundamental questions that relate science, history, philosophy, neuroscience, religion, and spirituality with mental health. The second section discusses the main beliefs and practices related to world religions and their implications to mental health. The third reviews the impact of R/S on specific clinical situations and offers practical guidance on how to handle these appropriately, such as practical suggestions for assessing and integrating R/S in personal history anamnesis or psychotherapy.

James Bahoh proposes a new methodology for explaining Heidegger's philosophy that solves a set of interpretive problems in his difficult later work and led to substantial inconsistencies in the scholarship. Bahoh reconstructs Heidegger's concept of event in relation to his theories of history, truth, difference, ground and time-space.

Encyclopedia of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: ABC of Bioinformatics, Three Volume Set combines elements of computer science, information technology, mathematics, statistics and biotechnology, providing the methodology and in silico solutions to mine biological data and processes. The book covers Theory, Topics and Applications, with a special focus on Integrative –omics and Systems Biology. The theoretical, methodological underpinnings of BCB, including phylogeny are covered, as are more current areas of focus, such as translational bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and environmental informatics. Finally, Applications provide guidance for commonly asked questions. This major reference work spans basic and cutting-edge methodologies authored by leaders in the field, providing an invaluable resource for students, scientists, professionals in research institutes, and a broad swath of researchers in biotechnology and the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. Brings together information from computer science, information technology, mathematics, statistics and biotechnology Written and reviewed by leading experts in the field, providing a unique and authoritative resource Focuses on the main theoretical and methodological concepts before expanding on specific topics and applications Includes interactive images, multimedia tools and crosslinking to further resources and databases

Semantic web has grown into a mature field of research. Its methods find innovative applications on and off the World Wide Web. Its underlying technologies have significant impact on adjacent fields of research and on industrial applications. This new book series reports on the state-of-the-art in foundations, methods, and applications of semantic web and its underlying technologies. It is a central forum for the communication of recent developments and comprises research monographs, textbooks and edited volumes on all topics related to the semantic web. In this first volume several non-monotonic extensions to description logics (DLs) are investigated, namely auto-epistemic DLs, circumscriptive DLs and terminological default rules, all of which extend standard DL inference mechanisms by forms of closed-world and default reasoning associated to common-sense features. A matchmaking framework is established for semantic resource descriptions formulated in the DL formalism that uses various DL inferences to judge resource compatibility. Special emphasis lies on mapping the technical formalities of model-theoretic semantics of DLs to more intuitive notions that abstract from the details of logic for the framework’s easier adoption in applications. The particular contributions of Semantic Matchmaking with Nonmonotonic Description Logics span the fields of non-monotonic reasoning with description logics in artificial intelligence, matchmaking of ontology-based descriptions and semantic web service discovery. A novel tableaux calculus for reasoning in circumscriptive DLs is introduced and it is demonstrated how the various nonmonotonic extensions to description logics can be used to realize common-sense features and local closed-world reasoning in a semantic web setting in general.