This second edition of David Woodruff Smith’s stimulating introduction to Husserl has been fully updated and includes a new ninth chapter featuring contemporary issues confronting Husserl’s phenomenology. It introduces the whole of Edmund Husserl’s thought, demonstrating his influence on philosophy of mind and language, on ontology and epistemology, as well as ethical theory, and on philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science. Starting with an overview of Husserl’s life and works, and his place in twentieth-century philosophy and in Western philosophy as a whole, Smith introduces Husserl’s conception of phenomenology, explaining Husserl’s innovative theories of intentionality, objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. In subsequent chapters Smith covers Husserl’s logic, metaphysics, realism and transcendental idealism, epistemology, and (meta)ethics. Finally, the author assesses the significance and implications of Husserl’s work for contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Also included is a timeline, glossary, and extensive suggestions for further reading, making Husserl, second edition, essential reading for anyone interested in phenomenology, twentieth-century philosophy, and the continuing influence of this eminent philosopher.

What sorts of material objects are there? Many philosophers opt for surprising answers to this question that seem deeply at odds with how we ordinarily think about the material world. Some embrace radically eliminative views, on which there are far fewer objects than we ordinarily take there to be, while others go in for radically permissive views on which there are legions of extraordinary objects that somehow escape our notice, despite being highly visible and right before our eyes. In this book, Daniel Z. Korman defends our ordinary, intuitive judgments about which objects there are. The book responds to a wide variety of arguments that have driven people away from the intuitive view: arbitrariness arguments, debunking arguments, overdetermination arguments, arguments from vagueness and material constitution, and the problem of the many. It also criticizes attempts to show that permissive and eliminative views are, despite appearances, entirely compatible with our ordinary beliefs and intuitions.

This volume contains the papers presented at the “Second International S- posium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems” (FoIKS 2002), which was held in Schloß Salzau, Germany from February 20th to 23rd, 2002. FoIKS is a biennial event focusing on theoretical foundations of information and knowledge systems. It aims to bring together researchers working on the theoretical foundations of information and knowledge systems and to attract researchers working in mathematical ?elds such as discrete mathematics, c- binatorics, logics, and ?nite model theory who are interested in applying their theories to research on database and knowledge base theory. FoIKS took up the tradition of the conference series “Mathematical Fundamentals of Database S- tems” (MFDBS) which enabled East-West collaboration in the ?eld of database theory. The ?rst FoIKS symposium was held in Burg, Spreewald (Germany) in 2000. Former MFDBS conferences were held in Dresden (Germany) in 1987, Visegr ́ ad (Hungary) in 1989, and in Rostock (Germany) in 1991. Proceedings of these previous events were published by Springer-Verlag as volumes 305, 364, 495, and 1762 of the LNCS series. In addition the FoIKS symposium is intended to be a forum for intensive d- cussions. For this reason the time slot of long and short contributions is 60 and 30 minutes respectively, followed by 30 and 15 minutes for discussions, respectively. Furthermore, participants are asked in advance to prepare as correspondents to a contribution of another author. There are also special sessions for the pres- tation and discussion of open research problems.

The design and functioning of an information system improve to the extent that the system can handle the questions people ask. Surprisingly, however, researchers in the cognitive, computer, and information sciences have not thoroughly examined the multitude of relationships between information systems and questions -- both question asking and answering. The purpose of this book is to explicitly examine these relationships. Chapter contributors believe that questions play a central role in the analysis, design, and use of different kinds of natural or artificial information systems such as human cognition, social interaction, communication networks, and intelligent tutoring systems. Their efforts show that data structures and representations need to be organized around the questioning mechanisms in order to achieve a quick retrieval of relevant useful information.

Through an engagement with the philosophies of Proust's contemporaries, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, and Georg Simmel, Suzanne Guerlac presents an original reading of Remembrance of Things Past (A la recherche du temps perdu). Challenging traditional interpretations, she argues that Proust's magnum opus is not a melancholic text, but one that records the dynamic time of change and the complex vitality of the real. Situating Proust's novel within a modernism of money, and broadening the exploration through references to cultural events and visual technologies (commercial photography, photojournalism, pornography, the regulation of prostitution, the Panama Scandal, and the Dreyfus Affair), this study reveals that Proust's subject is not the esthetic recuperation of loss but rather the adventure of living in time, on both the individual and the social level, at a concrete historical moment.