The Fifth Cycle of Philosophy
Barry Smith
Brentano’s Four Phases
In a lecture, delivered in Vienna in 1894 and
dedicated "to the academic youth of AustriaHungary", Franz Brentano outlined four phases
of advance and decline which he saw as
providing the key to the understanding of the
history of Western philosophy.
The Four Phases of Philosophy
rapid
progress
practical
interest
scepticism
mysticism
3
First Cycle
Aristotle
empirical
wonderment
Thales to
Aristotle
Stoicism and
Epicureanism
Pyrrho,
Eclectics
Neo-Pythagoreans,
Neo-Platonists
4
Second Cycle
Aquinas
learned
ignorance
Rediscovery of
Aristotle by Augustine
and Early Scholastics
Scotism
Ockham,
Nominalists
Lull,
Nicholas of
Cusa 5
Third Cycle
grounding
knowledge on
blind prejudices
Bacon
Christian Wolff
Descartes
Leibniz, Locke
Hume
Reid
Kant
Berkeley, Fichte
Schelling, Hegel
6
Philosophical mother ship gives
birth to empirical physics
Bacon
Rising practical
Descartes
(scientific) interest
Leibniz, Locke
Galileo, Newton
7
8
Fourth Cycle (Continental)
Brentano
Rediscovery
of Aristotle
Husserl
Reinach
Ingarden
Heidegger
Derrida and
the French
9
Philosophical mother ship gives
birth to the new empirical
science of psychology
Brentano,Stumpf
Meinong,Ehrenfels
Wilhelm Wundt
1
The Birth of Psychology
1874: Brentano publishes Psychology from
an Empirical Standpoint
Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi
scientiae naturalis est.
1879: Wundt establishes world’s first
psychological laboratory at the University of
Leipzig
1883: Wundt establishes a journal entitled
Philosophische Studien, to publish the
results of his laboratory experiments
11
The Birth of Psychology
1889: First International Congress of
Psychology; Meinong founds Laboratory of
Psychology in Graz
1892: American Psychological Association
founded, with 42 members
1894: Stumpf becomes professor of philosophy
in Berlin with explicit task of establishing an
institute of psychology
1907: Twardowski founds first psychological
laboratory in Poland
12
Fourth Cycle (Analytical)
Frege
Wittgenstein1o
Russell
ViennaCircle Wittgenstein2o Rorty
Gödel
Quine
Feyerabend
Tarski
Goodman
13
Philosophy gives birth to
mathematical logic and
computer science
Frege
Russell
Whitehead
Gödel
Tarski
Turing
14
Each final phase of
decline, with its ultimate
collapse into nonsense
and jokes, gives rise to
the call for a new phase
of renewal.
Derrida
Rorty
Judith Butler
15
You are now here
Derrida
Rorty
Butler
16
The Fifth Cycle
Phases of renewal are associated with a
new focus on empiricism, on rigour and
clarity, a new scientific relevance of
philosophy,
17
Rise of analytical metaphysics
Roderick Chisholm
E.J.Lowe,
David Armstrong
Peter Simons
Ingvar Johansson …
18
Something’s happening here …
but you don’t know what it is,
Mr Jones
Russell, Husserl, Ingarden,
Chisholm, E.J.Lowe, Armstrong
Simons, Ingvar Johansson, Kit Fine
Maurizio Ferraris??? Patrick Hayes,
19
why were disciplines such as
physics or psychology … founded?
feelings of chaos, sectarianism, superficiality,
deadendedness, triviality inside philosophy
philosophy goes round and round in circles forever rere-re-re-re-explaining Kant’s theory of apperception
new methods for tackling philosophical problems also
address extra-philosophical concerns
empirical results
increasing cross-disciplinary collaboration between
philosophy and extra-philosophical disciplines
20
21
Philosophical mother ship gives
birth to the new science
of ontology
Husserl, Ingarden, Chisholm
E.J.Lowe, David Armstrong
Peter Simons, Ingvar Johansson
Patrick Hayes, Cornelius Rosse
22
What is ontology?
23
Google hits Jan. 2004
ontology + Heidegger
ontology + Aristotle
ontology + philosophy
ontology + software
ontology + database
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58K
77K
327K
468K
594K
Comparison 2004/2012
ontology + Heidegger
58K
1.91M
ontology + Aristotle
77K
1.66M
ontology + philosophy
327K
4.91M
ontology + software
468K
7.80M
ontology + database
594K 10.20M
25
Ontology (philosophy)
(Synonym of ‘metaphysics’) The
science of being. A theory of the
types of entities existing in reality,
and of the relations between them,
for example between basic and nonbasis entities.
26
Ontology (science)
The science which develops theories of the
types of entities existing in given domains of
reality, and of the relations between them
such theories are represented as
computational artifacts called ‘ontologies’
which are used to describe heterogeneous
data in consistent ways to support
comparison and integration
27
World’s first ontology scientist
Cornelius Rosse (born in Hungary in 1932,
studied Aristotle in the Jesuit seminar in
Budapest, used his knowledge of Aristotle
to create the Foundational Model of
Anatomy (FMA), the first philosophically
rigorous biological ontology
Rosse draw on his knowledge of Aristotle to create
the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), the
first philosophically rigorous biological ontology
Anatomical
Structure
Anatomical Space
Organ Cavity
Subdivision
Organ
Cavity
Organ
Serous Sac
Cavity
Subdivision
Serous Sac
Cavity
Serous Sac
Organ
Component
Organ
Subdivision
Pleural Sac
Pleural
Cavity
Parietal
Pleura
Interlobar
recess
Organ Part
Mediastinal
Pleura
Pleura(Wall
of Sac)
Visceral
Pleura
Mesothelium
of Pleura
120,000 terms (nodes); over 2.1 million relations (edges)
Tissue
Entity
Independent
Continuant
Anatomical
Structure
Anatomical Space
Organ Cavity
Subdivision
Serous Sac
Cavity
Subdivision
Organ
Cavity
Serous Sac
Cavity
Organ
Serous Sac
Organ Part
Organ
Component
Organ
Subdivision
World’s most successful
ontology
31
32
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
33
www.geneontology.org
how a logically and philosophically well-structured
ontology can contribute to integration across
massively heterogeneous data sources
34
Ontology (science)
is not a job for software engineers
but it is not a job for philosophers, either,
e.g. where ontology is playing an
increasing role in supporting
interdisciplinary communication between
human beings – for example in improving
communication between Federal
government departments
35
Typical reasons for founding a new
discipline
feelings of chaos, deadendedness, triviality
inside the mother discipline
new methods for tackling problems of the
mother discipline
new kinds of empirical methods and results
increasing need for cross-disciplinary
collaboration – e.g. marked by multiauthorship
36
What is needed to found a new
discipline
Funding
Journals
Conferences
Institutes
Societies
Industrial applications
Military applications
37
Funding
38
Examples of Ontology (Science) Projects
funded by US National Institutes of Health
NIH / NHGRI
NIH / NIGMS
NIH / NIAID
NIH / NIDCR
NIH / NHGRI
NIH / NLM
NIH / NHGRI
GO: Gene Ontology
PRO: Protein Ontology
IDO: Infectious Disease Ontology
Ontology for Mental Disease
SO: Sequence Ontology
FMA: Foundational Model of
Anatomy
CL: Cell Ontology
by now at least $500 million funding from NIH
39
Journals
• Applied Ontology
• Journal of Biomedical Semantics
• International Journal of Metadata,
Semantics and Ontologies
• Ontology Development and Applications
• Journal of Social Ontology
40
Conferences
Formal Ontology in Information Systems
Bio-Ontologies
Ontology for the Intelligence Community
(now: Semantic Technology for
Intelligence, Defence and Security)
International Conference on Biomedical
Ontology
Annual NIST Ontology Summit
41
http://icbo14.com/
42
http://fois2014.inf.ufes.br/
43
http://stids.c4i.gmu.edu/
44
Research Institutes (Examples)
Laboratory for Applied Ontology (Trento and
Rome)
LabOnt (Turin and Rome)
Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical
Information Science (Saarbrücken)
Centre for Knowledge Analytics and
Ontological Engineering (Bangalore)
National Center for Biomedical Ontology
(Stanford Medical School, Mayo Clinic,
Buffalo Department of Philosophy)
45
http://www.loa-cnr.it/
46
founded 1999
http://www.labont.it/
47
Founded 2002
48
Ontology Societies
International Association for Ontology and
Its Applications (iaoa.org)
International Society for Biocuration
(biocurator.org)
UK Ontology Network (ukontology.org)
49
Industrial applications
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ontologies
Industrial applications
siri
51
http://www.indeed.com/q-Ontology-jobs.html
52
Military applications
53
US DoD Civil Affairs strategy for non-classified
information sharing
54
Military Applications
Geographic
Coordinates
Set
instance_
of
has
location
designates
Spatial
Region
Distance
Measurement
Result
Geopolitical
Entity
has
location
is_a
Village
Name
designates
Village
Well
Latrine
instance_of
instance_of
instance_of
instance_of
instance_of
’16 meters’
‘VT 334
569’
measurement_of
located
near
‘Khanabad
Village’
located
in
55
http://militaryontology.org/
56