A Computationally Assisted Reconstruction of an Ontological Argument in Spinoza’s The Ethics

The comments accompanying Proposition (Prop.) 11 (“God ... necessarily exists”) in Part I of Spinoza’s The Ethics contain sketches of what appear to be at least three more or less distinct ontological arguments. The first of these is problematic even on its own terms. More is true: even the proposition “God exists” (GE), a consequence of Prop. 11, cannot be derived from the definitions and axioms of Part I (the “DAPI”) of The Ethics; thus, Prop. 11 cannot be derived from the DAPI, either. To prove these claims, I use an automated deduction system (ADS) to show that Prop. 11 is independent of the DAPI. I then augment the DAPI with some auxiliary assumptions I believe Spinoza would accept and that sustain an automated derivation of (GE). The results illustrate how an ADS can facilitate the analysis of arguments and yield an apparently novel argument cast in the style of Spinoza.

Development and Instrumentation of a Framework for the Generation and Management of Self-Adaptive Enterprise Applications

Companies’ operations have become over-dependent on their supporting enterprise software applications. This situation has placed a heavy burden onto software maintenance teams who are expected to keep these applications up and running optimally in varying execution conditions. However, this high human intervention drives up the overall costs of software ownership. In addition, the current dynamic nature of enterprise applications constitutes challenges with respect to their architectural design and development, and the guarantee of the agreed quality requirements at runtime. Efficiently and effectively achieving the adaptation of enterprise applications requires an autonomic solution. In this paper we present SHIFT, a framework that provides (i) facilities and mechanisms for managing self-adaptive enterprise applications through the use of an autonomic infrastructure, and (ii) automated derivation of self-adaptive enterprise applications and their respective monitoring infrastructure. Along with the framework, our work leads us to propose a reference specification and architectural design for implementing self-adaptation autonomic infrastructures. We developed a reference implementation of SHIFT; our contribution includes the development of monitoring infrastructures, and dynamic adaptation planning and automated derivation strategies.