Molyneux's Problem

Suppose that a congenitally blind person has learned to distinguish and name a sphere and a cube by touch alone. Then imagine that this person suddenly recovers the faculty of sight. Will he be able to distinguish both objects by sight and to say which is the sphere and which the cube?
This was the question which the Irish politician and scientist William Molyneux posed in 1688 to John Locke. Molyneux's question has intrigued a wide variety of intellectuals for three centuries. Those who have attempted to solve it include Berkeley, Reid, Leibniz, Voltaire, La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot, Müller, Helmholtz, William James and Gareth Evans. This book is the first comprehensive survey of the history of the discussion about Molyneux's problem. It will be of interest to historians of both philosophy and psychology.

This book contains substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers from the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2010), held in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, June 8-12, 2010.

Two invited papers are presented together with 39 contributions, which were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 full papers presented at the conference (out of 448 submissions). They reflect state-of-the-art research work that is often driven by real-world applications, thus successfully relating the academic with the industrial community. The topics covered are: databases and information systems integration, artificial intelligence and decision support systems, information systems analysis and specification, software agents and internet computing, and human-computer interaction.