Barry Smith | |
---|---|
Born |
Bury, England |
June 4, 1952
Citizenship | United States |
Nationality | United Kingdom |
Fields |
Ontology Philosophy |
Institutions |
University of Manchester University of Sheffield International Academy of Philosophy, Liechtenstein University at Buffalo |
Alma mater |
University of Oxford University of Manchester (PhD, 1976) |
Thesis | The Ontology of Reference: Studies in Logic and Phenomenology (1976) |
Doctoral advisor | Wolfe Mays |
Notable students | Berit Brogaard |
Known for |
IFOMIS OBO Foundry Basic Formal Ontology |
Influences |
Aristotle Franz Brentano Edmund Husserl Adolf Reinach Roman Ingarden Michael Dummett |
Notable awards | Wolfgang Paul Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation |
Website ontology |
Barry Smith (born June 4, 1952) is an academic working in the fields of ontology and biomedical informatics. Smith is the author of more than 500 scientific publications, including 15 authored or edited books.
From 1970 to 1973 Smith studied Mathematics and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He obtained his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1976 for a dissertation on ontology and reference in Husserl and Frege. The dissertation was supervised by Wolfe Mays.
Among the cohort of graduate students working under Mays' direction were Kevin Mulligan (Geneva/Lugano), and Peter Simons (Trinity College, Dublin), both of whom shared with Smith an interest in the contributions of certain turn-of-the-century Continental philosophers and logicians to central issues of analytic philosophy. In 1979 Mulligan, Simons and Smith together founded the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy, which organized workshops and conferences centered around the work of early Central European philosophers from Bolzano to Tarksi and their impact on contemporary philosophy.
From 1976 to 1994 Smith held appointments in Sheffield (1976–1979), Manchester (1979–1989) and Liechtenstein (1989–1994). In 1994 he moved to the University at Buffalo (New York, USA), where he is currently Julian Park Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science and Engineering, and Neurology. From 2002 to 2006 Smith served as founding Director of the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) in Leipzig, Germany. The Institute moved to Saarbrücken in 2004.