The JKU Mourns the Passing of Prof. Rainer Born

a.Univ. Prof. Dr. Rainer Born (1943-2021) passed away on January 19, 2021.

Born worked tirelessly to create the Austrian Society for Philosophy, serving as the society's first Secretary General in 1985 and as President between 1998 and 2000. He remained an active member of the Presidium for many years.

Rainer Born's path to philosophy began with PPP (philosophy-psychology-pedagogy) studies at the University of Innsbruck with Gerhard Frey (philosophy) and Ivo Kohler (psychology), publishing his graduate thesis titled "Intuitionistische Logik". After a few years as an educator, in 1974 he became a research assistant to Bernulf Kanitscheider at the Center for Philosophy in Giessen. There he wrote his dissertation titled "Hyperräume" in 1977. In 1979, Rudolf Wohlgenannt hired him as a university assistant at the Institute of Philosophy at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. After completing his habilitation/post-doc in 1991, he remained an associate professor until his retirement. However, even after retiring, he continued to actively conduct research and teach for a long time, most recently at the Masaryk University in Brno.

Born worked primarily in the fields of logic and philosophy of science, whereby he (as one of few philosophers of science) repeatedly pointed out the importance of mediation and exploitation (in addition to origin and context for justification and reason). In this respect, his long-standing scientific project to develop general semantics for scientific languages should be read. In his own words, "The general findings from my studies was a new, universally applicable conception of semantics from which an epistemological approach emerged which I have called the LIR (language-information-reality) scheme. LIR is an attempt to be more comprehensive than any approach put forward in the literature to date. This 'semantics of science' (with an emphasis on epistemology and pragmatics) can play a key role in the context of exploitation and, in particular, in considering and assessing the emergence as well as justification of scientific findings as knowledge, not least in the context of implementation or the technological exploitation of (individual) scientific findings."

Rainer Born also focused intensively on "artificial intelligence", publishing the 1987 artificial intelligence volume "The Case Against" with Croom Helm (later: Routledge), which was last re-issued in 2020. Later, he conducted research primarily "in the field of cognitive sciences, i.e., in a border area at the interface of natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences." Between 1977 and 2004, he served as co-editor of the philosophical journal Conceptus.

Rainer Born was both an independent and idiosyncratic thinker and for many years, he was an important voice in the Austrian philosophical landscape. His critical and emphatic spirit as well as his sarcastic sense of irony will be remembered fondly by those who knew him.

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