Ontology and Metaontology: A Contemporary Guide is a clear and accessible survey of ontology, focusing on the most recent trends in the discipline. Divided into parts, the first half characterizes metaontology: the discourse on the methodology of ontological inquiry, covering the main concepts, tools, and methods of the discipline, exploring the notions of being and existence, ontological commitment, paraphrase strategies, fictionalist strategies, and other metaontological questions. The second half considers a series of case studies, introducing and familiarizing the reader with concrete examples of the latest research in the field. The basic sub-fields of ontology are covered here via an accessible and captivating exposition: events, properties, universals, abstract objects, possible worlds, material beings, mereology, fictional objects. The guide's modular structure allows for a flexible approach to the subject, making it suitable for both undergraduates and postgraduates looking to better understand and apply the exciting developments and debates taking place in ontology today.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. We need to understand the impossible. Francesco Berto and Mark Jago start by considering what the concepts of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality, and counterfactual supposition have in common. They are all concepts which divide the world up more finely than logic does. Logically equivalent sentences may carry different meanings and information and may differ in how they're believed. Fictions can be inconsistent yet meaningful. We can suppose impossible things without collapsing into total incoherence. Yet for the leading philosophical theories of meaning, these phenomena are an unfathomable mystery. To understand these concepts, we need a metaphysical, logical, and conceptual grasp of situations that could not possibly exist: Impossible Worlds. This book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies the concept to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy. It considers problems in the logic of knowledge, the meaning of alternative logics, models of imagination and mental simulation, the theory of information, truth in fiction, the meaning of conditional statements, and reasoning about the impossible. In all these cases, impossible worlds have an essential role to play.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. When one thinks-knows, believes, imagines-that something is the case, one's thought has a topic: it is about something, towards which one's mind is directed. What is the logic of thought, so understood? This book begins to explore the idea that, to answer the question, we should take topics seriously. It proposes a hyperintensional account of the propositional contents of thought, arguing that these are individuated not only by the set of possible worlds at which they are true, but also by their topic: what they are about. The book then builds epistemic, doxastic, probabilistic, and conditional logics based on this view. It applies them to issues ranging from dogmatism, scepticism, and epistemic fallibilism, to imagination and suppositional reasoning, belief revision, framing effects, and the acceptability of indicative conditionals.

The Mathematics of the Models of Reference is a detailed exposition of the modeling of physical and informational reality pursued by iLabs Milan ( www.ilabs.it ), a private research lab in applied Artificial Intelligence. Based on an original approach to cellular automata theory, this book includes an array of axiomatic formal theories, ranging from a discrete, mereological model of the structure of space-time, to non-standard computation and recursion theory. The appendices to the volume explain the applications of the theory in the algorithmic recapture of a variety of physical, biological, and cognitive phenomena. Francesco Berto Logic & Formal Modeling @ iLabs PhD in Philosophy, has studied at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), at the Sorbonne-Ecole Normale Suprieure of Paris, and is currently lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. He has published various papers and monographs in ontology and the philosophy of logic. Gabriele Rossi Director of iLabs A.I. Department @ iLabs Has a degree in Economic and Social Disciplines at the Bocconi University in Milan and is CEO of Diagramma, a leading company in insurance software applications. Expert in Artificial Intelligence, in 2007 he has co-authored with Antonella Canonico the book Semi-Immortality, a manifesto of European transhumanism. Jacopo Tagliabue Chief Scientist for Qualitative Modeling @ iLabs A PhD student with a degree in Philosophy at the University San Raffaele of Milan, has studied Economics at LSE, Statistics at New York University, and Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. He has published papers in ontology and non-standard computation.

"Ontology and Metaontology: A Contemporary Guide" is a clear and accessible survey of ontology, focussing on the most recent trends in the discipline. The first half of the book (Parts I and II) characterizes metaontology: the discourse on the methodology of ontological inquiry. It is thus concerned with the main concepts, tools, and methods of the discipline, exploring the notions of being and existence, ontological commitment, paraphrase strategies, fictionalist strategies, and other metaontological questions.The second half (Part III) considers a series of case studies, introducing and familiarizing the reader with concrete examples of the latest research in the field. The basic sub-fields of ontology are covered here via an accessible and captivating exposition: events, properties, universals, abstract objects, possible worlds, material beings, mereology, fictional objects. The guide's modular structure allows for a flexible approach to the subject, making it suitable for both undergraduates and postgraduates looking to better understand and apply the exciting developments and debates taking place in ontology today.""