Agency, Norms, Inquiry, and Artifacts: Essays in Honor of Risto Hilpinen (eBook)

The book contains a collection of chapters written by experts from the fields of philosophy, law, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence who pay tribute to Professor Risto Hilpinen's impressive work on the logic of induction, on deontic logic and epistemology, and on philosophy of science.

In addition to an introduction by the editors, a section on Professor Hilpinen's positions, professional services and honors, as well as a complete bibliography of his writings,  the editors, McNamara, Jones and Brown, have compiled a multidisciplinary global cross-section of academic contemporaries that provides insights and perspectives on Hilpinen's influence and legacy.

The essays reflect central aspects of Risto Hilpinen's research interests, and offer further contributions to some of the philosophical fields for which he is best known: applied modal logic, including deontic logic (from the ancient Greek d??? déon, pertaining to the concepts of duty and obligation), the semantics of normative language, the logic of action, and the theory of practical reasoning; the analysis of the concept of artifact; and the theory of semiotics in the tradition of Charles Peirce. The presence in the collection of several papers relating to deontic logic underlines Hilpinen's importance in that area, in which his publications have long been recognized as standard works. The book is an essential collection of ideas for all those who feel at home in a variety of formal disciplines, from propositional logic to the logic of artificial intelligence.

Paul McNamara concentrates his research in ethical theory, deontic logic, and the philosophy of moral language.  He is best known for his work in deontic logic-having authored (or co-authored) monograph-length overviews of deontic logic (in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in the Handbook of the History of Logic, vol. 7: Logic and the Modalities in the Twentieth Century, and in the Handbook of Deontic Logic and Normative Systems, Vol. 1). He is also well-known for a number of philosophical and logical articles where he identifies schemes that make room for supererogation and other often neglected concepts of common sense morality, a topic for which he is currently completing an invited monograph-length chapter for the second volume of the Handbook of Deontic Logic and Normative Systems.  He was a keynote for DEON 2014, and for Trends in Logic XVII, 2017. He was a fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London in 2005-2006, and he oversees the Northern New England Philosophical Association, and serves on the steering committees for the DEON conference series, and for the Formal Ethics conference series.