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WHY "SW-ENGINEERING WITH KANT" ? (Motivation)

- When I was in Königsberg 2 years ago for my last talk on 'Kant & Computer Science' all the other speakers were all professors of philosophy. The russian television was present for making some recordings of the sessions. One day they interviewed me and asked 'What does an engineer at a Kant conference ? Why are you interested in Kant ?'

- Well, I said, I am interested in Kant from the point of view of computer science because I think that computer schould be 'more like people', should be adapted to the human faculty of thinking. This requires that we understand better the human being and the human mind. And because Kant has provided some of the deepest and still up-to-date investigations on human beeing and human mind I hope to find in his work a help in the pursuit of this goal.

- This is still my 'professional motivation' for dealing with Kant in the context of my work as an engineer.

- What I did not say, was:  that since my childhood my personal experience with knowledge (at school, in family, at work) is in contrast with the 'established' view of knowledge and tells me, that

our knowledge (logos) cannot be a mapping that reproduces nature (physis)

- and that since 1980, when I actively began to investigate this experience by cooperating with Silvio Ceccato, an italian pioneer of AI, I collected more and more support for the 'dissident' view that

our knowledge is an ordering that is viable in nature.

- Last but not least, I see a motivation from the point of view of science, technology and business which consists in finding a way out of the software crisis