Department of Philosophy: People: Core Faculty: John Horty

John Horty (PhD, Pittsburgh) is Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and Affiliate Professor in the Computer Science Department. Horty's primary interests are in philosophical logic, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science more generally; he has secondary interests in the philosophy of language, decision theory, practical reasoning, and ethics. Horty is the author of two books (Agency and Deontic Logic, Oxford, 2001; Frege on Definitions, Oxford, 2007) as well as papers on a variety of topics in logic, philosophy, and computer science. Prior to coming to Maryland, he taught in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His work has been supported by two fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities and several grants from the National Science Foundation.

E-mail: see Personal Home Page

Personal Home Page: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/horty/index.html

Representative Publications

Frege on Definitions: A Case Study of Semantic Content. Oxford University Press (2007), 158 pp.

Agency and Deontic Logic. Oxford University Press (2001), 192 pp.

Defaults with priorities. Journal of Philosophical Logic, vol. 36 (2007), pp. 367-413.

Reasons as defaults. Philosophers' Imprint, vol. 7, no. 3 (2007), pp. 1-28.

The result model of precedent. Legal Theory, vol. 10 (2004), pp. 19-31.

Reasoning with moral conflicts. Nous, vol. 37 (2003), pp. 557-605.

Skepticism and floating conclusions. Artificial Intelligence, vol. 135 (2002), pp. 55-72.

Evaluating new options in the context of existing plans. (J. Horty and M. Pollack). Artificial Intelligence, vol. 127 (2001), pp. 199-220.

The deliberative stit: a study of action, omission, ability, and obligation. (J. Horty and N. Belnap). Journal of Philosophical Logic, vol. 24 (1995), pp. 583-644. Also appears in The Philosopher's Annual: Volume 18 - 1995 ("Ten Best Papers of 1995"), P. Grim, P. Ludlow, G. Mar, and P. Williams (eds.), Ridgeview Publishing Company (1997), pp. 205-266.

Some direct theories of nonmonotonic inheritance. In Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Volume 3: Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Uncertain Reasoning, D. Gabbay, C. Hogger, and J. Robinson (eds.), Oxford University Press (1994), pp. 111-187.

Moral dilemmas and nonmonotonic logic. Journal of Philosophical Logic, vol. 23 (1994), pp. 35-65.

A skeptical theory of inheritance in nonmonotonic semantic networks. (J. Horty, R. Thomason, and D. Touretzky). Artificial Intelligence, vol. 42 (1990), pp. 311-348.

A clash of intuitions: the current state of nonmonotonic multiple inheritance systems. (D. Touretzky, J. Horty, and R.Thomason). In Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (IJCAI-87), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (1987), pp. 476--482.