Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence

"A computer program capable of acting intelligently in the world must have a general representation of the world in terms of which its inputs are interpreted. Designing such a program requires commitments about what knowledge is and how it is obtained. Thus, some of the major traditional problems of philosophy arise in artificial intelligence.More specifically, we want a computer program that decides what to do by inferring in a formal language that a certain strategy will achieve its assigned goal. This requires formalizing concepts of causality, ability, and knowledge. Such formalisms are also considered in philosophical logic." - from the Introduction reprinted in Matthew Ginsberg (ed.), Readings in Nonmonotonic Reasoning, pp. 26-45, San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1987.Stanford web version. D. Michie and B. Meltzer (Eds.), Machine intelligence 4 - Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 463-502