Gary Herstein

After some 25 years in the computer and high-tech industries, I decided to abandon the ‘Bill Gates business model of life’ for the fame and fortune of academics. I have taught full-time at Merrimack and Muskingum colleges, and part time at William Raney Harper college, where the courses I presented included Ethics, Logic, Philosophy of Science, Process Philosophy and Pragmatism. I am currently an Independent Scholar working on various projects relating to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the logical forms and presuppositions of measurement, and the connections between spatial reasoning and general metaphysics. My publications include: (with Randall Auxier) The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism, through Routledge; Whitehead and the Measurement Problem of Cosmology, through ontos-verlag (now De Gruyter, May 2006); “Alfred North Whitehead” at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; “Thunder Road,” in Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy, Edited by Randall E. Auxier and Doug Anderson, Popular Culture and Philosophy series, Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago (2008), “Cosmology,” The Handbook of Mereology, Hans Burkhardt (Founding Editor), Johanna Seibt, Guido Imaguire, Stamatios Gerogiorgakis, editors. Philosophia Verlag, München (October 2017); “Theory of Groups and Social Measurement,” The Reasoner, volume 2, number 2, (February 2008); and “Davidson and the Impossibility of Psychophysical Laws” in Synthese 145 1 (2005). I presently keep house with my two cats, who despair of my ever learning anything interesting. (Full academic CV: https://independent.academia.edu/GaryHerstein/CurriculumVitae)

My interest in ontology engineering is an outgrowth of my AOS in philosophy of logic and philosophy of science. The process of building an "ontology" (from a philosophical point of view, many of the terms are not employed in an accurate or adequate way, hence my appeal to scare quotes) illustrates in a concrete and well-defined setting what Auxier and myself described as "the quantum of explanation" in our book by that same title. In addition to my own interests in topics of computation and complexity as these provide a framework for understanding the scope of possibility in scientific inquiry, I find the subject of ontology engineering intrinsically interesting. I am currently studying Keet's An Introduction to Ontology Engineering (creative commons license, 2018) both for my own education and with an eye toward building a 400+ level course in the philosophy of logic using ontology engineering as a source of concrete examples. This group looks like a good resource for current discussion on issues specific to the development side of knowledge systems and "ontologies".