Artificial Intelligence was born in 1956 as the off-spring of the newly-created cognitivist paradigm of cognition. As such, it inherited a strong philosophical legacy of functionalism, dualism, and positivism. This legacy found its strongest statement some 20 years later in the physical symbol systems hypothesis, a conjecture that deeply influenced the evolution of AI in subsequent years. Recen...

TH E Royal College of Phyficians at Nancy have propofed the following prize questions : " i. What are the unwholefome proper" ties of fnow water, ice water, or the waters " of chalky and gypfeous foils ? What affinities " and diftinftions are there between thefe four " fpecies of water, relative to their chemical <c compofition and their dietetic effects ? What " is the reafon that all waters w...

The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that wh...

Philosophical logic studies the relationships between philosophical stands and logic as well as the logical and philosophical consequences that can be drawn from these connections. There is a good deal of results in this area spread over the second half of last century and, these days, there seems to be a renewed interest in this topic perhaps due to the introduction of ontological concerns in ...

Can a system have the ability to dynamically generate, on demand, a large number of adequate exercises in order to feed a learning environment in philosophy? We addressed this issue with our Philosophical Gymnasium (Phi-GYM) project with its authoring tool. Our motivation in designing the authoring tool was to: (1) Find an effective way to provide a wide range of exercises, and to; (2) Provide ...

This paper, along with the following paper by John McCarthy, introduces some of the topics to be discussed at the IJCAI95 event ‘A philosophical encounter: An interactive presentation of some of the key philosophical problems in AI and AI problems in philosophy.’ Philosophy needs AI in order to make progress with many difficult questions about the nature of mind, and AI needs philosophy in orde...