Thesiss

The Web Ontology Language, OWL, is the latest standard in logic based ontology languages. It is built upon the foundations of highly expressive Description Logics, which are fragments of First Order Logic. These logical foundations mean that it is possible to compute what is ent…

In this thesis, I aim to motivate a particular philosophy of mathematics characterised by the following three claims. First, mathematical sentences are generally speaking false because mathematical objects do not exist. Second, people typically use mathematical sentences to comm…

Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence. Philosophers have used this principle in arguments for the existence of something ontologically fundamental, an ultimate ground of being, such as God. But if everything has an explanation of its existence, so, too, does…