Abstract
“Computer science and philosophy? Isn’t that sort of an odd combination?” Such is the typical cocktail-party response when learning of my academic training in the discipline Socrates called “the love of wisdom” and my subsequent immersion in the world of bytes, programs, systems analysis, and government contracts. And such might very well be the reaction to the title of this essay. But despite its cloistered reputation, and its literary, as opposed to technological image, the tradition of philosophical investigation, as all of us who have been seduced by it know, has no turf limits. No turf limits, at least, in one direction; while few but the truly prepared venture into philosophy’s hard-core: “inner circle” of epistemology, metaphysics, (meta)ethics, and logic, literally anything is fair philosophical game in the outer circle in which most of us exist. And so we have the “philosophy of’s”: philosophy of science, philosophy of art, of language, education. Some of the philosophy of’s even have names befitting their integration into vital areas of modern society, for example, medical ethics and business ethics, which we can say are shorter names for the philosophies of ethical decisions in medicine and business. This anthology is intended to be perhaps the first organization of various writings in a yet-to-crystalize philosophy of comouter science.
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Colburn, T.R. (1993). Computer Science and Philosophy. In: Colburn, T.R., Fetzer, J.H., Rankin, T.L. (eds) Program Verification. Studies in Cognitive Systems, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1793-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1793-7_1
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