The Seventh International Conference on Automated Deduction was held May 14-16, 19S4, in Napa, California. The conference is the primary forum for reporting research in all aspects of automated deduction, including the design, implementation, and applications of theorem-proving systems, knowledge representation and retrieval, program verification, logic programming, formal specification, program synthesis, and related areas. The presented papers include 27 selected by the program committee, an invited keynote address by Jorg Siekmann, and an invited banquet address by Patrick Suppes. Contributions were presented by authors from Canada, France, Spain, the United Kingdom , the United States, and West Germany. The first conference in this series was held a decade earlier in Argonne, Illinois. Following the Argonne conference were meetings in Oberwolfach, West Germany (1976), Cambridge, Massachusetts (1977), Austin, Texas (1979), Les Arcs, France (19S0), and New York, New York (19S2). Program Committee P. Andrews (CMU) W.W. Bledsoe (U. Texas) past chairman L. Henschen (Northwestern) G. Huet (INRIA) D. Loveland (Duke) past chairman R. Milner (Edinburgh) R. Overbeek (Argonne) T. Pietrzykowski (Acadia) D. Plaisted (U. Illinois) V. Pratt (Stanford) R. Shostak (SRI) chairman J. Siekmann (U. Kaiserslautern) R. Waldinger (SRI) Local Arrangements R. Schwartz (SRI) iv CONTENTS Monday Morning Universal Unification (Keynote Address) Jorg H. Siekmann (FRG) .