Issue 98076 Editor: Erik Sandewall 4.10.1998

Today

The present Newsletter contains several contributions that are too long to be included here in full. We therefore only advertise their topics, and refer to the full text via the web links which can be found, as usual, in the actions and change section of the ETAI Junction (= the overall webpage structure that has been set up for the ETAI and its side-activities).


Debates

Ontologies for time

Johan van Benthem has commented on our discussion on ontologies of time in a note with the title Points on Time. He summarizes the discussion, puts it into the perspective of historical and contemporary issues in philosophy, and gives his own analysis of the dividing instant problem as well as underlying and more general issues. Johan van Benthem's note can be accessed at http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/rac/notes/1998/03/debet.html.

Modal logics in KR

Lats year, Studia Logica published a note by John McCarthy entitled Modality, si! Modal logic, no!. The Journal of Logic, Language, and Information recently had a recent special issue on modal logic, including an editorial by Heinrich Wansing, of the university of Leipzig, Germany, with the title Modality, of course! Modal logic, si!.

The ENRAC Newsletter proposes to open this controversy to an open debate, since we know that several members of our community has clear opinions on the matter. We therefore invite long as well as short discussion contributions from the readership and also from others who wish to participate.

McCarthy's article is on his web page, and the link above goes to the copy of the article stored there. For Wansing's editorial, which was not previously posted on the web, Kluwer Academic Publishers who publish the journal have kindly given the permission so that we can post this editorial on the ETAI website.

Short contributions to this discussion will be represented as in all our other on-line discussions, so they can be sent by an ordinary E-mail message to the present editor. Longer contributions are better represented as ENRAC research notes, in the same format as we have used for the Wansing editorial. They also can be sent in as plain "ascii" text. If you should have special requirements besides plain text, for example if the contribution contains a considerable number of formulae, then please contact the editor for formatting instructions.