Ontology

This article is about ontology in philosophy. For the term in computer science, see ontology (computer science).

Ontology is one of major branches of philosophy, which studies questions of being or existence. It is a central part of Metaphysics. The questions include 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 exits rather than nothing, and so on.

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 (1224/5 - 1274) further developed it within 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Although Christian von Wolff (1679-1754) further developed it, ontology was superseded by epistemology by major modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant.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 is approached through linguistic analysis.

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. 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. 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. Parmenides took an opposite view. He 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 an 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 the ancient civilizations of India and China, in some cases perhaps predating the Greek thinkers who have become associated with the concept.

Aristotle: ontology as the "First Philosophy"

Plato developed his own perspectives but not as a distinctive area of studies. It was Aristotle who made 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 so on. What we mean by "exist" or "to-be" is 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 Christin philosophy and theology, and issues of ontology became subject matters of Scholasticism in the Middle Ages.

Modern philosophy

The term Ontology is, however, modern coinage. 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 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 gave the foundational role, in the sense of the universal study of being, to ontology. Philosophy is defined by him as the science of the possible, and divided, according to the two faculties of the human individual, into a theoretical and a practical part. 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 treats of 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 a 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 revived Thomistic ontology in a limited scale. 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 monumental studies of Aristotle's ontology.

Husserl dissatisfied with 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 is 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 impacts 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 human understanding is always interpretive so hermeneutics (a discipline that deals with arts and methods of interpretation) is indispensable for philosophical studies.

Heidegger took a human being as the access to the question of being. To highlight man's existence, he called man "Dasein." He pointed out that 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 [existentialism|existential]] of Dasein in one of his major works, Being and Time. 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 to traditional ontologies since Aristotle as well the entire traditions of Western philosophy. His quest for a new path of thinking led him to the studies of poetic language in his later carrier.

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.

Further examples of ontological questions include:

• What is existence? 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?
• What is a physical object? Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists?
• What could it mean to say that non-physical objects (such as times, numbers, souls, deities, values, imaginative objects) exist?
• What constitutes the identity of an object? When does an object go out of existence, as opposed to changing?
• 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?
• 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.)

Prominent ontologists

Anselm of Canterbury Thomas Aquinas Aristotle David Malet Armstrong Alain Badiou Gustav Bergmann Patricia Churchland Paul Churchland Gilles Deleuze

René Descartes Jean Gebser Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Martin Heidegger Heraclitus Edmund Husserl Roman Ingarden Saul Kripke

Gottfried Leibniz Friedrich Nietzsche William of Ockham Parmenides Plato Plotinus Hilary Putnam W. V. Quine

Bertrand Russell Gilbert Ryle Jean-Paul Sartre John Duns Scotus Barry Smith Baruch Spinoza P. F. Strawson Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Ludwig Wittgenstein

See also

Applied Ontology Category of being Cosmology Counterpart theory Epistemology Foundation ontology Mereological essentialism Mereology Metaphysics Modal logic Multimedia Web Ontology Language (MOWL) Nihilism

Personal Taxonomy Ontological argument Ontological security Ontological perfection Philosophy of science Philosophy of space and time Philosophy of mathematics Schema Ship of Theseus Solipsism Taxonomy Theology

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Brentano, Franz Clemens, and Rolf George. On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

External links

• Dmoz.org: Directory of links to Ontology
• Ontology. A resource guide for philosophers
• Ontologists of 19th and 20th centuries
• Living ontologists
• Buffalo Ontology Site

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