Difference between revisions of "Ontology" - New World Encyclopedia

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Ontology is one of major branches of [[philosophy]], which studies questions of being or existence. It is a central part of [[Metaphysics]]. Conceptual division of this branch of philosophy was established by [[Aristotle]]. He distinguished "a science of that studies being in so far as it is being" (Metaphysics, IV.1; 1003a21) and called it the "First Philosophy." [[Thomas Aquinas]] (1224/5 - 1274) further developed it within [[Christianity|Christian]] context and the issues were continually discussed by [[Scholasticism|Scholastics]]. The term "ontology" is, however, a modern coinage by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) (1591 - 1609) and [[Rudolf Goclenius|Rudolph Göckel]] (Goclenius) (1547 - 1628), created by a compound of "on" ([[Greek language|Greek]] {{polytonic|ὤν}}, genitive {{polytonic|ὄντος}}: ''of being'' (part. of {{polytonic|εἶναι}}: ''to be'')) and "-logy" or "logos" ([[-logy|-λογία]]: ''science'', ''study'', ''theory'').
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Ontology is a major branch of [[philosophy]] and a central part of [[metaphysics]] that studies questions of being or existence. The questions include a wide range of issues concerning being or existence such as: the meaning of being or what it means "to be" for each of such beings as physical entities, [[soul]]s, [[God]], values, numbers, time, space, imaginary objects, and others; what is real existence; why something exists rather than nothing.  
  
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The conceptual division of this branch of philosophy was established by [[Aristotle]]. He distinguished "a science of that studies being in so far as it is being" (Metaphysics, IV.1; 1003a21) and called it the "First Philosophy." [[Thomas Aquinas]] (1224/1225 - 1274) further developed it within a [[Christianity|Christian]] context and the issues were continually discussed as the central issue in philosophy by [[Scholasticism|Scholastics]]. The term "ontology" is, however, a modern coinage by [[Jacob Lorhard]] (Lorhardus) (1591 - 1609) and [[Rudolf Goclenius|Rudolph Göckel]] (Goclenius) (1547 - 1628), as a compound of "on" ([[Greek language|Greek]] {{polytonic|ὤν}}, genitive {{polytonic|ὄντος}}: ''of being'' (part. of {{polytonic|εἶναι}}: ''to be'')) and "-logy" or "logos" ([[-logy|-λογία]]: ''science,'' ''study,'' ''theory'').
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Although [[Christian von Wolff]] (1679 - 1754) further developed it, ontology was superseded by [[epistemology]] as a major concern by major modern philosophers from [[Descartes]] to [[Kant]]. In the twentieth century, [[Nicolai Hartmann]], [[Martin Heidegger]], and [[Neo-Thomism|Neo-Thomists]] shed new light on ontology and revived its popularity. In the tradition of [[Analytic philosophy]], questions of being are approached through linguistic analysis.
  
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== Some basic questions ==
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==Some questions of ontology==
  
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Ontology has one basic question: "What exists?" Different [[philosophers]] provide different answers to this question.
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Examples of ontological questions include:
  
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One common approach is to divide the extant entities into groups called "categories." However, these lists of categories are also quite different from one another. It is in this latter sense that ontology is applied to such fields as [[theology]], [[information science]] and [[artificial intelligence]].
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* Why does anything exist, rather than nothingness? (a question raised by [[Leibniz]])
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Further examples of ontological questions include:
 
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* What is [[existence]]? Is existence a [[Category_of_being#Properties|property]]? What does it mean to say something does not exist? Is existence properly a predicate? Are sentences expressing the existence or non-existence of something properly called propositions?
 
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* What is a [[physical object]]?  Can one give an account of [[the existence of physical objects|what it means to say that a physical object exists]]?
 
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* What could it mean to say that non-physical objects (such as times, numbers, souls, or deities) exist?
 
 
* What constitutes the ''[[Identity (philosophy)|identity]]'' of an object? When does an object go ''out'' of existence, as opposed to ''[[change|changing]]''?
 
* What constitutes the ''[[Identity (philosophy)|identity]]'' of an object? When does an object go ''out'' of existence, as opposed to ''[[change|changing]]''?
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* What features are essential, as opposed to merely accidental, attributes of a given object? What are an object's [[properties]] or relations and how are they related to the object itself?  
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* Is existence an event, flux, process? Or is it something static, stable, or unchanging?
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* Why are we here? Why does anything exist, rather than nothingness? (Though, according to some, these questions may be more in the realm of [[Cosmology (metaphysics)|cosmology]].)
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* How is existence related to time and space? What is and kind of being is time and space? Is it a being or something else?
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* What features are essential, as opposed to merely accidental, attributes of a given object? What are an object's [[properties]] or relations and how are they related to the object itself?  
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* What could it mean to say that non-physical objects (such as times, numbers, souls, deities, values, imaginative objects) exist? What is [[existence]]?
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* What is a [[physical object]]? Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists?
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* Is existence a [[Category_of_being#Properties|property]]? What does it mean to say something exists or does not exist? Is existence properly a predicate? Are sentences expressing the existence or non-existence of something properly called propositions?
  
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== Concepts ==
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Questions of being are also closely tied to those of language, [[logic]], [[theology]], [[taxonomy]], and other areas.
  
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Quintessential ontological [[concept]]s include:
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== Some questions of being in Pre-Socratic philosophy: Heraclitus and Parmenides ==
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Questions of being began as early as sixth century B.C.E. by [[Pre-Socratics]] in [[Ancient Greece]]. [[Heraclitus]] and [[Parmenides]], for example, inquired into the ultimate nature of existence and arrived at two contrasting views. On one hand, Heraclitus affirmed change as the ultimate nature of things. Heraclitus viewed being as a "process" and argued that there is nothing unchanging in the world. He symbolized the status of ever-changing nature of being as "fire." The existence of fire lies in its activities so as other beings do. There is nothing, he argued, that is not changing. On the other hand, Parmenides denied that there is any real change in the universe and argued that we can not even speak of any change without presupposing some unchanging self-identity. We can observe changes only in appearance but they are merely appearances of the unchanging reality. If we use an analogy to understand his view, we can take the example of matter in physics. While a given energy can appear in various forms such as heat or mass, the totality of the energy of a given material remains the same. One may also argue that if there is nothing unchanging, we cannot even claim any permanent principle including the principle of change itself. Is being an ever-changing event, flux, and a temporal process? Or is it immutable, a-temporal, and stable existence? This is one of perennial issues in ontology. Pre-Socratic philosophers discussed various other questions of being but they did not conceptualized ontology as a distinct area of inquiry.
  
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* [[Universal (metaphysics)|Universals]]
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Ontological questions have also been raised and debated by thinkers in other ancient civilizations, in some cases perhaps predating the Greek thinkers who have become associated with the concept. For example, Ontology is an aspect of the [[Samkhya]] school of philosophy from the first millenium B.C.E.<ref>Gerald James Larson, Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, and Karl H. Potter, ''The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume 4: Samkhya, A Dualist Tradition in Indian Philosophy'' (Princeton University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0691604411), 3-11.</ref> The concept of [[Guna]] which describes the three properties ([[sattva]], [[rajas]], and [[Tamas (philosophy)|tamas]]) present in differing proportions in all existing things, is a notable concept of this school.
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* [[Substance theory|Substance]]
 
  
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== Early history of ontology ==
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== Aristotle: ontology as the "First Philosophy" ==
  
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The concept of ontology is generally thought to have originated in early [[Greece]]. Before [[Socrates]], questions of being, stasis and change occupied [[Parmenides]] and [[Heraclitus]]. Parmenides is associated with the view that being must be affirmed and non-being avoided and denied. This is also expressed by Parmenides in the dictum "ἔστι γὰρ εἶναι" or "It is, namely, being." Parmenides denied that there is any real change in the universe, and Heraclitus is diammetrically opposed to Parmenides in his affirmation of change as the ultimate nature of things.
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[[Plato]] developed his own perspectives but not as a distinctive area of study. It was Aristotle who made the conceptual distinction and established ontology as a branch of philosophy. Aristotle understood that there are many senses of being or various senses when we say something "exists." For example, when we say "God exists," "a book exits," "there is justice," "numbers exist," "laws exist," "time exists," "I exit," "life exits," and what we mean by "exist" and "to-be" are not equivocal. Aristotle called the studies of "being as being" the First Philosophy and his First Philosophy was closely tied to [[Theology]] as the study of a supreme being.
  
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After Socrates, ontology was very important for [[Plato]] and [[Aristotle]].  While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself is the Latin form ''ontologia'', which appeared in 1661, in the work ''Ogdoas Scholastica'' by Jacob Lorhard ''(Lorhardus)'' and in 1631 in the ''Lexicon philosophicum'' by [[Rudolf Goclenius|Rudolph Göckel]] ''(Goclenius)''.
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[[Thomas Aquinas]] incorporated Aristotelian ontology into Christian ideas and developed Christian philosophy and theology; issues of ontology became the subject matters of [[Scholasticism]] in the Middle Ages.
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The first occurrence in English of "ontology" as recorded by the OED appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as ‘an Account of being in the Abstract’.  However its appearance in a dictionary indicates it was in use already at that time.  It is likely the word was first used in its Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots, which themselves are based on the Greek.
 
  
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Students of Aristotle first used the word 'metaphysica' (literally "after the physics" because these works were placed after his works on physics) to refer to the work their teacher described as "the science of being ''qua'' being."  The word '' 'qua' '' means 'in the capacity of'.  According to this theory, then, ontology is the science of being inasmuch as it is being, or the study of ''beings'' insofar as they exist.  Take anything you can find in the world, and look at it, not as a puppy or a slice of pizza or a folding chair or a president, but just as something that ''is''.  More precisely, ontology concerns determining what ''[[category of being|categories of being]]'' are fundamental and asks whether, and in what sense, the items in those categories can be said to "be."
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==Modern philosophy==
  
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Ontological questions have also been raised and debated by thinkers in the ancient civilizations of India and China, in some cases perhaps predating the Greek thinkers who have become associated with the concept.<ref>[http://formalontology.it/history.htm A history of philosophical development]</ref>
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The term Ontology is, however, a fairly modern term. While the [[etymology]] is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself is the Latin form ''ontologia,'' which appeared in 1661, in the work ''Ogdoas Scholastica'' by Jacob Lorhard ''(Lorhardus)'' and in 1631 in the ''Lexicon philosophicum'' by Rudolf Goclenius (Rudolph Göckel or Goclenius). Goclenius, a German logician, however, used ontology, in a limited sense, as an abstract studies of physical entities and did not mean a general studies of being. It was Johannes Clauberg (1622 - 1665) who used ontology in the sense of a universal studies of being, which was closer to Aristotelian sense.
  
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== Subject, relationship, object ==
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The first occurrence in English of "ontology" as recorded by the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (OED) appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as
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'an Account of being in the Abstract." However its appearance in a dictionary indicates it was in use already at that time. It is likely the word was first used in its Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots, which themselves are based on the Greek. Clauberg also used the word "ontosophia" as well as ontology.
  
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"What exists," "What is," "What am I," "What is describing this to me," all exemplify questions about being, and highlight the most basic problems in ontology: finding a subject, a relationship, and an object to talk about. During the [[the Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] the view of [[René Descartes]] that "[[cogito ergo sum]]" ("I think therefore I am") had generally prevailed, although Descartes himself did not believe the question worthy of any deep investigation. However, Descartes was very religious in his [[philosophy]], and indeed argued that "cogito ergo sum" proved the existence of [[God]]. Later theorists would note the existence of the "[[Cartesian Other]]" &mdash; asking "who is reading that sentence about thinking and being?" &mdash; and generally concluded that it must be God.
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It was, however, [[Christian Wolff]] who played the foundational role in addressing ontology in the sense of the universal study of being. Philosophy is defined by him as the science of the possible and divided it, according to the two faculties of the human individual, into theoretical and practical parts. [[Logic]], sometimes called philosophia rationales, forms the introduction or propaedeutic to both. Theoretical philosophy has for its parts ontology or ''philosophia prima,'', [[cosmology]], rational psychology and natural theology; ontology examines the existent in general, psychology of the soul as a simple non-extended substance, cosmology of the world as a whole, and [[rational theology]] of the existence and attributes of God. Wolff's conceptual distinction was succeeded by [[Kant]].  
  
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This answer, however, became increasingly unsatisfactory in the [[20th century]] as the [[philosophy of mathematics]] and the [[philosophy of science]] and even [[particle physics]] explored some of the most fundamental barriers to knowledge about being. Sociological theorists, most notably [[George Herbert Mead]] and [[Erving Goffman]], saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other," the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self. The Cartesian Other was also used by Freud, who saw the [[Ego, superego, and id|superego]] as an abstract regulatory force.
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Medieval philosophy generally accepted two sources of knowledge: [[revelation]] and [[reason]] (natural light). [[Descartes]] rejected revelation as the legitimate source of knowledge and preserved reason alone. Thinkers after him similarly raised questions of the legitimate source of knowledge and human capacities of knowledge. Theory of knowledge or [[Epistemology]] gradually became dominant and it superseded ontology. In other words, before we discuss the questions of being, the questions of the limit of our knowledge or the limit of what we can know became the primary issue. Kant established the primacy of epistemology in theoretical studies of philosophy and rejected traditional ontology, which Wolff developed, as "dogmatism."
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</b>
 
  
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== Body and environment ==
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In the middle of nineteenth century, [[Neo-Scholasticism]] emerged and they re-introduced [[Thomism|Thomistic]] ontology. In the twentieth century, ontology was revived by [[Husserl]] and other [[phenomenology|phenomenologists]].
  
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Schools of [[metaphysical subjectivism|subjectivism]], [[metaphysical objectivism|objectivism]] and [[relativism]] existed at various times in the 20th century, and the [[postmodernism|postmodernists]] and [[embodied philosophy|body philosophers]] tried to reframe all these questions in terms of bodies taking some specific [[philosophy of action|action]] in an environment. This relied to a great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking instinctive action in natural and artificial settings &mdash; as studied by [[biology]], [[ecology]], and [[cognitive science]].
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== Contemporary philosophy ==
  
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The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of [[being]] itself became difficult to really define. What did people mean when they said "A is B," "A must be B," "A was B"...? Some linguists advocated dropping the verb "to be" from the English language, leaving "[[E-Prime|E&nbsp;Prime]]," supposedly less prone to bad abstractions. Others, primarily philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage. [[Martin Heidegger|Heidegger]] attempted to distinguish ''being'' and ''existence''.
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[[Husserl]] (1859 – 1938) was the founder of a new philosophical movement called [[phenomenology]]. He realized that there are various senses of being on one hand, and our perceptual capacities are also multifaceted. Since he was a student of [[Franz Brentano]] (1838 - 1917), Husserl probably learned [[Aristotle|Aristotelian]] ontology from Brentano. Brentano's ''On the several senses of Being in Aristotle'' ''(Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles)'' was one of the monumental studies of Aristotle's ontology.  
  
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== Anselm's Ontological Argument for the existence of God ==
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Husserl was dissatisfied with the narrow, one-sided view of being in modern philosophy. He criticized that modern philosophers presupposed sense perception as the primary cognitive faculty and physically sensible qualities as the primary quality of being. In other words, the model of being was taken from a material object. Husserl argued that faculties of mind are far diverse and they include feeling, sensing, imagining, reasoning, believing, loving, willing, hoping, and so on. The framework of modern philosophy did not capture this multifaceted faculties of mind. Each object equally presents its existence in multifaceted ways. Husserl developed phenomenology as a philosophical methodology to describe diverse senses of being. Husserl attempted to establish what he called "Formal Ontology" within his own phenomenological framework. [[Nicolai Hartmann]] (1882 – 1950) also developed "Critical Ontology" within phenomenological tradition.
  
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Issues of an ontological nature become of concern regarding discussions about possible  descriptions of God. Anselm's description of God is of  "that which nothing greater can be conceived." Anselm argues the '[[A priori and a posteriori (philosophy)|a priori]]' argument for the existence of God, stating that if God is "that which nothing greater can be conceived" of, he would have to exist for this description to be correct. Something which exists is greater than that which is imagined. God would necessarily, according to Anselm, exist, as we could possibly imagine something to be greater than God, which would therefore be impossible. Anselm's argues that as things which exist are greater than those which are imagined, God would have to, therefore exist for his description to be accurate.
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[[Martin Heidegger]] (1889 – 1976) made a decisive impact on the revival of ontology in the twentieth century. He combined phenomenology and [[hermeneutics]] and developed "hermeneutic phenomenology" as his philosophical methodology to approach the questions of being. While Husserl developed phenomenology as the analysis of consciousness and a philosophical discipline that clarifies the essential principles of being, Heidegger took a different path. Heidegger argued that since human understanding is always interpretive, hermeneutics (a discipline that deals with arts and methods of interpretation) is indispensable for philosophical studies.  
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The counter-argument states that, just because one cannot think of something greater than God does not mean that there ''is'' nothing greater, except by arbitrary definition: "God = That which nothing greater can be conceived."
 
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This is a circular argument, using a definition that limits the possible answers (thus limiting God, which is then problematical); the cognitive powers of mind transcend actual reality all the time (contrary to the concept that something real is greater than something imagined).
 
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One might also take the stance that God is something that  is beyond [[Conception]]; World Religions in common practice define their God(s) as: ''without beginning or end'', or ''Not Born, and therefore, Not Mortal''.
 
  
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== Being and non-being ==
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Heidegger took the human being as the access point to the question of being. To highlight man's existence, he called man "Dasein." He pointed out that the human being is a kind of being whose sense of being (meaning of life) or non-being (death) is always at stake. Heidegger carried out an [[existentialism|existential]] analysis of Dasein in one of his major works, ''Being and Time.'' In it, Heidegger attempted to clarify the intricate relationships among being, time, life, death, conscience, man's original (authentic) and non-original (in-authentic) way of existence, interconnectedness of beings, [[teleology|teleological]] relationships among beings, hermeneutics, and other fundamental questions of ontology. He was critical of traditional ontologies since Aristotle as well the entire tradition of Western philosophy. His quest for a new path of thinking led him to the studies of poetic language in his later carrier.
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{{section-stub}}
 
  
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Many forms of [[existentialism]] regard ''[[being]]'' as a fundamental central concept. [[Heidegger]] had much to say on the matter of being.  The [[verb]] [[to be]] has many different meanings in different contexts and can therefore be rather [[ambiguity|ambiguous]].  Because "to be" has so many different meanings, there are, accordingly, many different [[ways of being]].<ref>[http://formalontology.it/being.htm A Discourse on Being]</ref>.
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After Heidegger, [[Sartre]] and other phenomenologists also approached the question of being.  
  
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Descartes argues that God is a 'supremely perfect being' and that existence is a perfection so therefore God must exist. This also links to Descartes ''cogito ergo sum'' 'I think therefore I am' stating that we are thinking things and therefore exist in some unarguable form.
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Philosophers in the tradition of [[Analytic philosophy]] approached the questions of being through the analysis of languages including the extensive use of [[logic]].
  
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== Becoming ==
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==See also==
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{{section-stub}}
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*[[Metaphysics]]
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*[[Substance]]
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*[[Teleology]]
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*[[Aristotle]]
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*[[Plato]]
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*[[Thomas Aquinas]]
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*[[Scholasticism]]
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*[[Thomism]]
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*[[Husserl]]
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*[[Heidegger]]
  
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The first formal development of this notion within [[philosophy]] began with the [[pre-Socratic]] [[Heraclitus]], where he posited ''agon'' ("strife of opposites") as the ontological basis of all reality in terms of this endless transformative conflict, which was later contrasted and dominated by the [[Parmenides|Parmenidean]], or [[Platonic]], notion of Being, until more recent philosophers began a reversion of this trend.
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== Notes==
  
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Notably and the first to make such an advocation since Heraclitus was the nineteenth century German philosopher [[Friedrich Nietzsche]], who used the expression "the innocence of becoming," a fundamental element of his philosophical thought grounded in the "will to power as ''pathos''," as a  means to describe the aesthetic qualities of existence, which pervades his thinking, including but not limited to ideas such as his "Dionysian world," "eternal recurrence," "amor fati," and "decadence." It was with this a-teleological view that he attempted to disgregate all views pertaining to the human condition, where "thingness" is ultimately characterized as a mere "hypothesis" in Nietzsche's phrase, and such a view, pertaining to the "inequality" of all "things," carries deep implications for ethics and the nature of knowledge.
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<references/>
  
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Likewise, in his [[Science of Logic | Logic]], [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Hegel]] uses Becoming as a mediating force in his [[Dialectic | dialectical]] model of ontology. In this model, Being is, on the one hand, opposing to Non-Being and, on the other hand, "is the same as Non-Being." Becoming acts therefore as the process by which Being comes into itself, or "becoming is the unity of being and not-being." [http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/hegel/1015.pdf]
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==References==
  
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=== Process philosophy ===
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*Anton, John Peter, George L. Kustas, and Anthony Preus. ''Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy.'' Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1971. ISBN 087395050X.
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{{main|Process philosophy}}
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*Aquinas, Thomas. ''An Introduction to the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas.'' Chicago, IL: H. Regnery Co., 1953.
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Process philosophy as developed by [[Alfred North Whitehead]] (1861-1947) and [[Charles Hartshorne]] (1897-2000) is school of thought which maintains that reality is ''always'' in a process of "becoming."
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*Aristotle, and Hippocrates George Apostle. ''Metaphysics.'' Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966.
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*Brentano, Franz Clemens, and Rolf George. ''On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle.'' Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975. ISBN 0520023463.
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*Gilson, Etienne. ''Being and Some Philosophers.'' Toronto, CA: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952.
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*Hartmann, Nicolai. ''New Ways of Ontology''. Chicago, IL: H. Regnery Co., 1953.
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*Heidegger, Martin. ''Being and Time.'' New York, NY: Harper, 1962.
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*Husserl, Edmund. ''Cartesian Meditations An Introduction to Phenomenology.'' The Hague, NL: M. Nijhoff, 1960.
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*Larson, Gerald James, Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, and Karl H. Potter. ''The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume 4: Samkhya, A Dualist Tradition in Indian Philosophy''. Princeton University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0691604411
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*Marcel, Gabriel. ''The Mystery of Being.'' Chicago, IL: H. Regnery, 1960.
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*McCormick, John Francis. ''Scholastic Metaphysics.'' Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1928.
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*Munitz, Milton Karl. ''Logic and Ontology.'' New York, NY: New York University Press, 1973. ISBN 0814753639.
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*Overgaard, Søren. ''Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World.'' Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. ISBN 1402020430.
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*Steenberghen, Fernand van. ''Ontology.'' New York, NY: J.F. Wagner, 1952.
  
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== Social science ==
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== External links ==
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All links retrieved November 17, 2022.
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Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches: [[critical realism|realism]] (the idea that facts are out there just waiting to be discovered), [[empiricism]] (the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts), [[positivism]] (which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves), and [[postmodernism]] (which holds that facts are fluid and elusive, so that we should focus ''only'' on our observational claims).
 
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== Prominent ontologists ==
 
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* [[Anselm of Canterbury]]
 
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* [[Thomas Aquinas]]
 
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* [[Aristotle]]
 
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* [[David Malet Armstrong]]
 
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* [[Alain Badiou]]
 
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* [[Gustav Bergmann]]
 
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* [[Patricia Churchland]]
 
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* [[Paul Churchland]]
 
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* [[Gilles Deleuze]]
 
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* [[René Descartes]]
 
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* [[Jean Gebser]]
 
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* [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel]]
 
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* [[Martin Heidegger]]
 
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* [[Heraclitus]]
 
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* [[Edmund Husserl]]
 
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* [[Roman Ingarden]]
 
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* [[Saul Kripke]]
 
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* [[Gottfried Leibniz]]
 
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* [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]
 
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* [[William of Ockham]]
 
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* [[Parmenides]]
 
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* [[Plato]]
 
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* [[Plotinus]]
 
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* [[Hilary Putnam]]
 
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* [[W. V. Quine]]
 
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|width=25%|
 
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* [[Bertrand Russell]]
 
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* [[Gilbert Ryle]]
 
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* [[Jean-Paul Sartre]]
 
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* [[John Duns Scotus]]
 
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* [[Barry Smith (ontologist)|Barry Smith]]
 
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* [[Baruch Spinoza]]
 
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* [[P. F. Strawson]]
 
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* [[Pierre Teilhard de Chardin]]
 
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* [[Ludwig Wittgenstein]]
 
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|}
 
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==See also==
 
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{{Sisterlinks|Ontology}}
 
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* [[Applied Ontology]]
 
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* [[Category of being]]
 
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* [[Cosmology]]
 
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* [[Counterpart theory]]
 
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* [[Epistemology]]
 
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* [[Foundation ontology]]
 
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* [[Mereological essentialism]]
 
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* [[Mereology]]
 
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* [[Metaphysics]]
 
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* [[Modal logic]]
 
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* [[Multimedia Web Ontology Language]] ([[MOWL]])
 
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* [[Nihilism]]
 
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|width=50%|
 
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* [[Personal Taxonomy]]
 
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* [[Ontological argument]]
 
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* [[Ontological security]]
 
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* [[Perfection#Ontological and theological perfection|Ontological perfection]]
 
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* [[Philosophy of science]]
 
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* [[Philosophy of space and time]]
 
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* [[Philosophy of mathematics]]
 
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* [[Schema]]
 
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* [[Ship of Theseus]]
 
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* [[Solipsism]]
 
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* [[Taxonomy]]
 
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* [[Theology]]
 
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== References ==
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* [http://www.formalontology.it Ontology. A resource guide for philosophers].
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{{reflist}}
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* [http://www.formalontology.it/ontologists.htm Ontologists of 19th and 20th centuries].
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* [http://www.formalontology.it/ontologists_living.htm Living ontologists].
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== External links ==
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* [http://ontology.buffalo.edu Buffalo Ontology Site].
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* [http://dmoz.org/Society/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Ontology/ Dmoz.org: Directory of links to Ontology]
 
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* [http://www.formalontology.it Ontology. A resource guide for philosophers]
 
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* [http://www.formalontology.it/ontologists.htm Ontologists of 19th and 20th centuries]
 
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* [http://www.formalontology.it/ontologists_living.htm Living ontologists]
 
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* [http://ontology.buffalo.edu Buffalo Ontology Site]
 
  
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===General Philosophy Sources===
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*[http://plato.stanford.edu/ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy].
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*[http://www.iep.utm.edu/ The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].
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*[http://www.bu.edu/wcp/PaidArch.html Paideia Project Online].
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*[http://www.gutenberg.org/ Project Gutenberg].
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Latest revision as of 00:43, 18 November 2022


Ontology is a major branch of philosophy and a central part of metaphysics that studies questions of being or existence. The questions include a wide range of issues concerning being or existence such as: the meaning of being or what it means "to be" for each of such beings as physical entities, souls, God, values, numbers, time, space, imaginary objects, and others; what is real existence; why something exists rather than nothing.

The conceptual division of this branch of philosophy was established by Aristotle. He distinguished "a science of that studies being in so far as it is being" (Metaphysics, IV.1; 1003a21) and called it the "First Philosophy." Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225 - 1274) further developed it within a Christian context and the issues were continually discussed as the central issue in philosophy by Scholastics. The term "ontology" is, however, a modern coinage by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) (1591 - 1609) and Rudolph Göckel (Goclenius) (1547 - 1628), as a compound of "on" (Greek ὤν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be)) and "-logy" or "logos" (-λογία: science, study, theory).

Although Christian von Wolff (1679 - 1754) further developed it, ontology was superseded by epistemology as a major concern by major modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant. In the twentieth century, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, and Neo-Thomists shed new light on ontology and revived its popularity. In the tradition of Analytic philosophy, questions of being are approached through linguistic analysis.

Some questions of ontology

Examples of ontological questions include:

  • Why does anything exist, rather than nothingness? (a question raised by Leibniz)
  • What constitutes the identity of an object? When does an object go out of existence, as opposed to changing?
  • Is existence an event, flux, process? Or is it something static, stable, or unchanging?
  • How is existence related to time and space? What is and kind of being is time and space? Is it a being or something else?
  • What features are essential, as opposed to merely accidental, attributes of a given object? What are an object's properties or relations and how are they related to the object itself?
  • What could it mean to say that non-physical objects (such as times, numbers, souls, deities, values, imaginative objects) exist? What is existence?
  • What is a physical object? Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists?
  • Is existence a property? What does it mean to say something exists or does not exist? Is existence properly a predicate? Are sentences expressing the existence or non-existence of something properly called propositions?

Questions of being are also closely tied to those of language, logic, theology, taxonomy, and other areas.

Some questions of being in Pre-Socratic philosophy: Heraclitus and Parmenides

Questions of being began as early as sixth century B.C.E. by Pre-Socratics in Ancient Greece. Heraclitus and Parmenides, for example, inquired into the ultimate nature of existence and arrived at two contrasting views. On one hand, Heraclitus affirmed change as the ultimate nature of things. Heraclitus viewed being as a "process" and argued that there is nothing unchanging in the world. He symbolized the status of ever-changing nature of being as "fire." The existence of fire lies in its activities so as other beings do. There is nothing, he argued, that is not changing. On the other hand, Parmenides denied that there is any real change in the universe and argued that we can not even speak of any change without presupposing some unchanging self-identity. We can observe changes only in appearance but they are merely appearances of the unchanging reality. If we use an analogy to understand his view, we can take the example of matter in physics. While a given energy can appear in various forms such as heat or mass, the totality of the energy of a given material remains the same. One may also argue that if there is nothing unchanging, we cannot even claim any permanent principle including the principle of change itself. Is being an ever-changing event, flux, and a temporal process? Or is it immutable, a-temporal, and stable existence? This is one of perennial issues in ontology. Pre-Socratic philosophers discussed various other questions of being but they did not conceptualized ontology as a distinct area of inquiry.

Ontological questions have also been raised and debated by thinkers in other ancient civilizations, in some cases perhaps predating the Greek thinkers who have become associated with the concept. For example, Ontology is an aspect of the Samkhya school of philosophy from the first millenium B.C.E.[1] The concept of Guna which describes the three properties (sattva, rajas, and tamas) present in differing proportions in all existing things, is a notable concept of this school.

Aristotle: ontology as the "First Philosophy"

Plato developed his own perspectives but not as a distinctive area of study. It was Aristotle who made the conceptual distinction and established ontology as a branch of philosophy. Aristotle understood that there are many senses of being or various senses when we say something "exists." For example, when we say "God exists," "a book exits," "there is justice," "numbers exist," "laws exist," "time exists," "I exit," "life exits," and what we mean by "exist" and "to-be" are not equivocal. Aristotle called the studies of "being as being" the First Philosophy and his First Philosophy was closely tied to Theology as the study of a supreme being.

Thomas Aquinas incorporated Aristotelian ontology into Christian ideas and developed Christian philosophy and theology; issues of ontology became the subject matters of Scholasticism in the Middle Ages.

Modern philosophy

The term Ontology is, however, a fairly modern term. While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself is the Latin form ontologia, which appeared in 1661, in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and in 1631 in the Lexicon philosophicum by Rudolf Goclenius (Rudolph Göckel or Goclenius). Goclenius, a German logician, however, used ontology, in a limited sense, as an abstract studies of physical entities and did not mean a general studies of being. It was Johannes Clauberg (1622 - 1665) who used ontology in the sense of a universal studies of being, which was closer to Aristotelian sense.

The first occurrence in English of "ontology" as recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as 'an Account of being in the Abstract." However its appearance in a dictionary indicates it was in use already at that time. It is likely the word was first used in its Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots, which themselves are based on the Greek. Clauberg also used the word "ontosophia" as well as ontology.

It was, however, Christian Wolff who played the foundational role in addressing ontology in the sense of the universal study of being. Philosophy is defined by him as the science of the possible and divided it, according to the two faculties of the human individual, into theoretical and practical parts. Logic, sometimes called philosophia rationales, forms the introduction or propaedeutic to both. Theoretical philosophy has for its parts ontology or philosophia prima,, cosmology, rational psychology and natural theology; ontology examines the existent in general, psychology of the soul as a simple non-extended substance, cosmology of the world as a whole, and rational theology of the existence and attributes of God. Wolff's conceptual distinction was succeeded by Kant.

Medieval philosophy generally accepted two sources of knowledge: revelation and reason (natural light). Descartes rejected revelation as the legitimate source of knowledge and preserved reason alone. Thinkers after him similarly raised questions of the legitimate source of knowledge and human capacities of knowledge. Theory of knowledge or Epistemology gradually became dominant and it superseded ontology. In other words, before we discuss the questions of being, the questions of the limit of our knowledge or the limit of what we can know became the primary issue. Kant established the primacy of epistemology in theoretical studies of philosophy and rejected traditional ontology, which Wolff developed, as "dogmatism."

In the middle of nineteenth century, Neo-Scholasticism emerged and they re-introduced Thomistic ontology. In the twentieth century, ontology was revived by Husserl and other phenomenologists.

Contemporary philosophy

Husserl (1859 – 1938) was the founder of a new philosophical movement called phenomenology. He realized that there are various senses of being on one hand, and our perceptual capacities are also multifaceted. Since he was a student of Franz Brentano (1838 - 1917), Husserl probably learned Aristotelian ontology from Brentano. Brentano's On the several senses of Being in Aristotle (Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles) was one of the monumental studies of Aristotle's ontology.

Husserl was dissatisfied with the narrow, one-sided view of being in modern philosophy. He criticized that modern philosophers presupposed sense perception as the primary cognitive faculty and physically sensible qualities as the primary quality of being. In other words, the model of being was taken from a material object. Husserl argued that faculties of mind are far diverse and they include feeling, sensing, imagining, reasoning, believing, loving, willing, hoping, and so on. The framework of modern philosophy did not capture this multifaceted faculties of mind. Each object equally presents its existence in multifaceted ways. Husserl developed phenomenology as a philosophical methodology to describe diverse senses of being. Husserl attempted to establish what he called "Formal Ontology" within his own phenomenological framework. Nicolai Hartmann (1882 – 1950) also developed "Critical Ontology" within phenomenological tradition.

Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) made a decisive impact on the revival of ontology in the twentieth century. He combined phenomenology and hermeneutics and developed "hermeneutic phenomenology" as his philosophical methodology to approach the questions of being. While Husserl developed phenomenology as the analysis of consciousness and a philosophical discipline that clarifies the essential principles of being, Heidegger took a different path. Heidegger argued that since human understanding is always interpretive, hermeneutics (a discipline that deals with arts and methods of interpretation) is indispensable for philosophical studies.

Heidegger took the human being as the access point to the question of being. To highlight man's existence, he called man "Dasein." He pointed out that the human being is a kind of being whose sense of being (meaning of life) or non-being (death) is always at stake. Heidegger carried out an existential analysis of Dasein in one of his major works, Being and Time. In it, Heidegger attempted to clarify the intricate relationships among being, time, life, death, conscience, man's original (authentic) and non-original (in-authentic) way of existence, interconnectedness of beings, teleological relationships among beings, hermeneutics, and other fundamental questions of ontology. He was critical of traditional ontologies since Aristotle as well the entire tradition of Western philosophy. His quest for a new path of thinking led him to the studies of poetic language in his later carrier.

After Heidegger, Sartre and other phenomenologists also approached the question of being.

Philosophers in the tradition of Analytic philosophy approached the questions of being through the analysis of languages including the extensive use of logic.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Gerald James Larson, Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, and Karl H. Potter, The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume 4: Samkhya, A Dualist Tradition in Indian Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0691604411), 3-11.

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Anton, John Peter, George L. Kustas, and Anthony Preus. Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1971. ISBN 087395050X.
  • Aquinas, Thomas. An Introduction to the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas. Chicago, IL: H. Regnery Co., 1953.
  • Aristotle, and Hippocrates George Apostle. Metaphysics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966.
  • Brentano, Franz Clemens, and Rolf George. On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975. ISBN 0520023463.
  • Gilson, Etienne. Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto, CA: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952.
  • Hartmann, Nicolai. New Ways of Ontology. Chicago, IL: H. Regnery Co., 1953.
  • Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York, NY: Harper, 1962.
  • Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations An Introduction to Phenomenology. The Hague, NL: M. Nijhoff, 1960.
  • Larson, Gerald James, Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, and Karl H. Potter. The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Volume 4: Samkhya, A Dualist Tradition in Indian Philosophy. Princeton University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0691604411
  • Marcel, Gabriel. The Mystery of Being. Chicago, IL: H. Regnery, 1960.
  • McCormick, John Francis. Scholastic Metaphysics. Chicago, IL: Loyola University Press, 1928.
  • Munitz, Milton Karl. Logic and Ontology. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1973. ISBN 0814753639.
  • Overgaard, Søren. Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World. Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004. ISBN 1402020430.
  • Steenberghen, Fernand van. Ontology. New York, NY: J.F. Wagner, 1952.

External links

All links retrieved November 17, 2022.

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