Agency, Norms, Inquiry, and Artifacts: Essays in Honor of Risto Hilpinen

The book contains a collection of chapters written by experts from the fields of philosophy, law, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence who pay tribute to Professor Risto Hilpinen's impressive work on the logic of induction, on deontic logic and epistemology, and on philosophy of science.
In addition to an introduction by the editors, a section on Professor Hilpinen's positions, professional services and honors, as well as a complete bibliography of his writings,  the editors, McNamara, Jones and Brown, have compiled a multidisciplinary global cross-section of academic contemporaries that provides insights and perspectives on Hilpinen's influence and legacy.
The essays reflect central aspects of Risto Hilpinen's research interests, and offer further contributions to some of the philosophical fields for which he is best known: applied modal logic, including deontic logic (from the ancient Greek d??? déon, pertaining to the concepts of duty and obligation), the semantics of normative language, the logic of action, and the theory of practical reasoning; the analysis of the concept of artifact; and the theory of semiotics in the tradition of Charles Peirce. The presence in the collection of several papers relating to deontic logic underlines Hilpinen's importance in that area, in which his publications have long been recognized as standard works. The book is an essential collection of ideas for all those who feel at home in a variety of formal disciplines, from propositional logic to the logic of artificial intelligence.

Paul McNamara concentrates his research in ethical theory, deontic logic, and the philosophy of moral language.  He is best known for his work in deontic logic-having authored (or co-authored) monograph-length overviews of deontic logic (in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in the Handbook of the History of Logic, vol. 7: Logic and the Modalities in the Twentieth Century, and in the Handbook of Deontic Logic and Normative Systems, Vol. 1). He is also well-known for a number of philosophical and logical articles where he identifies schemes that make room for supererogation and other often neglected concepts of common sense morality, a topic for which he is currently completing an invited monograph-length chapter for the second volume of the Handbook of Deontic Logic and Normative Systems.  He was a keynote for DEON 2014, and for Trends in Logic XVII, 2017. He was a fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Studies, University of London in 2005-2006, and he oversees the Northern New England Philosophical Association, and serves on the steering committees for the DEON conference series, and for the Formal Ethics conference series.

Andrew J. I. Jones has published research in a broad range of areas in applied logic and theoretical AI, including deontic logic, AI and Law, the formal analysis of communicative acts, the logic of self-deception, and the logical characterization of the emotions.  With José Carmo he wrote a chapter on contrary-to-duty obligations that appeared in volume 8 of the second edition of the Handbook of Philosophical Logic (2002), and with Davide Grossi he wrote the chapter on constitutive norms and counts-as conditionals in the Handbook of Deontic Logic and Normative Systems, Vol. 1 (2013). He was a founding executive co-editor of the Journal of Applied Logic, and a member of the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence & Law. He served on the program committees for several of the DEON conferences, was PC co-chair of DEON 2002, and invited speaker at DEON 1996. He was elected Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 1999.
Mark Brown focuses his research on philosophically applied logic, with special emphasis on deontic logic, the logic of action and ability, the logic of time, and the connections among these areas.  He has also done extensive research on generalized quantifiers.  He has served on the Program Committee for all but three of the biennial series of DEON conferences, which started in 1991, coedited (with José Carmo) the DEON '96 volume 'Deontic Logic, Agency and Normative Systems', and was an invited Speaker for DEON '2004. He was also keynote speaker for the 1993 meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy. He is past President of the Creighton Club (the New York State Philosophical Association).