Ontology

The ontology (from the ancient Greek ὄν [on] —genitive ὄντος— [ontos], 'entity'; and λόγος [lógos] 'science, study, theory') or general metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies what there is, as well as the relationships between entities (for example, the relationship between a universal —such as red— and a particular that it 'has it'—like an apple) or the relationship between an act (such as Socrates drinking the hemlock) and its participants (Socrates and the hemlock).

Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or higher genera are and how they form a category system that provides a comprehensive classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include substances, properties, relationships, states of affairs, and events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, such as particularity and universality, abstraction and concreteness or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependency, which determines whether the entities of a category exist at the most fundamental level. Disagreements within the ontology often revolve around whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are related to other entities.

Some ontological questions are: what is matter? What is a process? What is space-time? Are there emergent properties? Do all events conform to some law(s)? Are there natural species? What makes an object real? Are there final causes? Is chance real? Many traditional questions in philosophy can be understood as ontological questions: Does God exist? Are there mental entities, such as ideas and thoughts? Are there abstract entities, such as numbers? Are there universals?

When used as a countable noun, the terms "ontology" and "ontologies" they do not refer to the science of being, but to the theories within the science of being. Ontological theories can be divided into several types according to their theoretical commitments. Monocategorical ontologies maintain that there is only one basic category, which is rejected by polycategorical ontologies. Hierarchical ontologies assert that some entities exist at a more fundamental level and that other entities depend on them. Flat ontologies, on the other hand, deny that privileged status to any entity.

Overview

Ontology is closely associated with Aristotle's question of "being qua being": the question of what all entities in the broadest sense have in common. The principle Eleatic is an answer to this question: it asserts that being is inextricably linked to causality, that "power is the mark of Being". A problem with this answer is that it excludes objects abstract. Another explicit but little accepted answer can be found in Berkeley's slogan that "to be is to be perceived". Closely related but not identical to the question of "being qua being" it is the problem of categories. Categories are generally considered to be the highest types or genera. A system of categories provides a classification of entities that is exclusive and exhaustive: each entity belongs to exactly one category. Various such classifications have been proposed, often including categories of substances, properties, relationships, states of affairs, and events. At the core of the differentiation between categories are various fundamental concepts and ontological distinctions, for example, the concepts particularity and universality, abstraction and concretion, ontological dependence, identity and modality . These concepts are sometimes treated as categories themselves, used to explain the difference between categories, or play other central roles in characterizing different ontological theories. Within ontology, there is a lack of general consensus on how different categories should be defined. Different ontologists often disagree on whether a given category has members or whether a certain category is fundamental.

Personal and universal

Particulars or individuals are generally contrasted with universals. Universals refer to characteristics that can be exemplified by several different particulars. For example, a tomato and a strawberry are two particulars that exemplify the universal of the color red. Universals can be present in several different places in space at the same time, while particulars are restricted to one place at a given time. Furthermore, universals can be fully present at different times, which is why they are sometimes called repeatables (repeatables) in contrast to non-repeatable particulars. The so-called universals problem is the problem to explain how different things can coincide in their characteristics, for example, how a tomato and a strawberry can both be red. Universal realists believe that there are universals. They can solve the problem of universals by explaining the common through a universal shared by both entities. Realists are divided among themselves on whether universals can exist independently of being instantiated by something ("ante res") or not ("in rebus"). Nominalists, on the other hand, deny that there are universals. They have to resort to other notions to explain how a feature can be common to several entities, for example, by postulating fundamental resemblance relationships between the entities (resemblance nominalism) or a shared membership of entities. a common natural class (class nominalism) (class nominalism).

Abstract and concrete

Many philosophers agree that there is an exclusive and exhaustive distinction between concrete objects and abstract objects. Some philosophers consider this to be the most general division of being. Examples of concrete objects include plants, humans, and planets, while things like numbers, sets, and propositions are abstract objects. But despite general agreement on the paradigm cases, there is less consensus as to what the characteristic marks are. of concreteness and abstraction. Popular suggestions include defining the distinction in terms of the difference between (1) existing within or outside of space-time, (2) having causes and effects or not, and (3) having contingent or necessary existence.

Ontological dependency

An entity is ontologically dependent on another entity if the first entity cannot exist without the second entity. Ontologically independent entities, on the other hand, can exist on their own. For example, the surface of an apple cannot exist without the apple and is therefore ontologically dependent on it. Entities often characterized as ontologically dependent they include properties, which depend on their carriers, and boundaries, which depend on the entity they demarcate from its environment. As these examples suggest, ontological dependence must be distinguished from causal dependence, in which an effect depends for its existence on an entity. cause. It is often important to draw a distinction between two types of ontological dependency: rigid and generic. Rigid dependency refers to dependency on a specific entity, like the surface area of an apple depends on its specific apple. Generic dependency, on the other hand, it implies a weaker form of dependency: dependency on a certain type of entity. For example, electricity generically depends on charged particles, but does not depend on any specific charged particle. Dependency relations are relevant to ontology, as ontologically dependent entities are often held to have a way of being less robust. In this way a hierarchy is introduced into the world that brings with it the distinction between more and less fundamental entities.

Identity

Identity is a basic ontological concept often expressed by the word "same". It is important to distinguish between qualitative identity and numerical identity. For example, consider two children with identical bicycles racing while their mother watches. The two children have the same bicycle in one sense (qualitative identity) and the same mother in another sense (numerical identity i>). Two qualitatively identical things are often said to be indistinguishable. The two senses of identity are linked by two principles: the principle of indiscernibility of the identicals and the principle of identity of the indiscernibles. The principle of indiscernibility of identicals is undisputed and states that if two entities are numerically identical to each other, then they exactly resemble each other. The principle of identity of indiscernibles, on the other hand, is more discussed by making the converse statement that if two entities exactly resemble each other, then they must be numerically identical. This implies that "no two dissimilar things are exactly alike". A well-known counterexample comes from by Max Black, who describes a symmetrical universe consisting of only two spheres with the same characteristics. Black argues that the two spheres are indiscernible but not identical, thus constituting a violation of the principle of identity of indiscernibles.

The problem of identity over time refers to the question of persistence: whether, or in what sense, two objects at different times can be numerically identical. This is often referred to as diachronic identity, in contrast to synchronous identity. The claim that "the table in the next room is identical to the one you bought last last year" asserts the diachronic identity between the table now and the table then. medium. The traditional position on the problem of persistence is endurantism, the thesis that diachronic identity in a strict sense is possible. One problem with this position is that it seems to violate the principle of indiscernibility of identicals: the object may have undergone changes in the meantime, resulting in it being discernible from itself. four-dimensionalism) is an alternative approach that holds that diachronic identity is only possible in a loose sense: although the two objects differ from each other in the strict sense, both are temporal parts belonging to at the same all temporally extended. endurantism avoids many philosophical problems that plague endurantism , but endurantism seems to be more in touch with the way we normally conceive of diachronic identity.

Modality

The modality refers to the concepts of possibility, reality and necessity. In contemporary discourse, these concepts are often defined in terms of possible worlds. A possible world is a complete way of how things could have been. The real world is one possible world among others: things could have been different from what they were. what they really are. A proposition is possibly true if there is at least one possible world in which it is true; is necessarily true if it is true in all possible worlds. possible. Actualists hold that reality is at its core real and that possible worlds are to be understood in terms of actual entities, for example, as fictions or as sets of sentences. Possibilists, on the other hand, assign to worlds possible the same fundamental ontological status as the real world. This is a form of modal realism, which holds that reality has irreducibly modal characteristics. Another important issue in this field concerns the distinction between contingent beings and contingent beings. i>necessary. Contingent beings are beings whose existence is possible but not necessary. Necessary beings, on the other hand, could not have failed to exist. It has been suggested that this distinction is the highest division of being.

Substances

The category of substances has played a central role in many ontological theories throughout the history of philosophy. "Substance" it is a technical term within philosophy that should not be confused with the more common use in the sense of chemical substances such as gold or sulfur. Various definitions have been given, but among the most common characteristics attributed to substances in the philosophical sense is that they are particulars that are ontologically independent: they are capable of existing by themselves. Being ontologically independent, substances can play the role of fundamental entities in the ontological hierarchy. If "ontological independence" is defined as including causal independence, then only self-causing entities, such as Spinoza's God, can be substances. With a specifically ontological definition of 'independence', many everyday objects, such as books or cats, can be considered substances. Another defining characteristic often attributed to substances is their ability to undergo change. Changes imply something that exists before, during and after the change. They can be described in terms of a persistent substance that gains or loses properties, or of a matter changing its shape. From this perspective, the ripening of a tomato can be described as a change in which the tomato loses its green color and gains its red color. It is sometimes held that a substance can have a property in two ways: essentially and accidentally. A substance can survive a change of accidental properties, but it cannot lose its essential properties, which constitute its nature.

Properties and relationships

The category of properties consists of entities that can be exemplified by other entities, for example, by substances. Properties characterize their carriers, express what their carrier is like. For example, the Red color and the round shape of an apple are properties of this apple. Various ways of thinking about properties themselves and their relation to substances have been suggested. The traditionally dominant view is that properties are universals found in their carriers. As universals, they can be shared by different substances. Nominalists, on the other hand, deny the existence of universals. Some nominalists try to explain properties in terms of resemblance relations or class membership. Another alternative for nominalists is to conceptualize properties as simple particulars, so-called tropes. This position implies that both the apple and its red color are particular. Different apples may still resemble each other exactly with respect to their color but they do not share the same particular property from this point of view: the two color tropes are numerically distinct. Another important issue for any theory of properties is how to conceive of the relationship between a carrier and its properties. Substrate theorists hold that there is some kind of substance, substrate, or bare particular (bare particular) that acts as a carrier. bundle theory is an alternative view that dispenses with a substratum altogether: objects are considered simply a bundle of properties. They are held together not by a substratum but by the call compresence relation (compresence relation) responsible for the grouping. Both the substrate theory and the bundle theory can be combined with the conceptualization of properties as universals or as particulars.

An important distinction between properties is between categorical properties and dispositional properties. Categorical properties refer to how something is, for example, what qualities it has. Dispositional properties, on the other hand, involve what powers something has, what it is capable of doing, even if it isn't actually doing it. For example, the shape of a sugar cube is a categorical property, while its tendency to dissolving in water is a dispositional property. For many properties there is a lack of consensus on how they should be classified, for example whether colors are categorical or dispositional properties. Categoricalism is the thesis that at a fundamental level there are only categorical properties, that dispositional properties are non-existent or depend on categorical properties. Dispositionalism is the opposite theory, giving ontological primacy to dispositional properties. Between these two extremes, there are dualists who allow both categorical and dispositional properties in their ontology.

The relationships are ways in which things, relates them, are linked to each other. Relationships are in many ways similar to properties in that both characterize the things to which they apply. Properties are sometimes treated as a special case of relations involving only a relatum. Central to ontology is the distinction between internal and external relations. internal if it is completely determined by the characteristics of their relata. For example, an apple and a tomato stand in the internal relationship of similarity to each other because they are both red. Some philosophers have inferred from this that the internal relationships do not have a their own ontological status, since they can be reduced to intrinsic properties. The external relations, on the other hand, are not fixed by the characteristics of their relata. For example, a book is in an outer relationship to a table by being on top of it. But this is not determined by the characteristics of the book or the table such as its color, its shape, etc.

States of affairs and events

States of affairs are complex entities, unlike substances and properties, which are generally thought of as simple. Complex entities are built from or constituted by other entities. Atomic states of affairs are constituted by a particular and a property instantiated by this particular. For example, the state of affairs that Socrates is wise is constituted by the particular "Socrates" and the property "wise". Relational states of affairs imply several particulars and a relation that connects them. Actual states of affairs are known as facts. It is controversial what ontological status should be attributed to non-actual states of affairs. States of affairs have been prominent in century ontology XX, since various theories have been advanced to describe the world as composed of states of affairs. It is often held that states of affairs play the role of truth makers: the judgments or affirmations are true because the corresponding state of affairs is effective.

Events occur over time, sometimes thought to involve a change in the way property is acquired or lost, like the grass drying up. But from a liberal point of view, property retention without any change can also be considered an event, for example the grass is kept wet. Some philosophers view events as universals that can be repeated at different times, but the more dominant view is that events are particular and therefore, non-repeatable. Some events are complex in the sense that they are made up of a sequence of events, often called a process. But even simple events can be thought of as complex entities involving an object, time, and property exemplified by the object at that moment. The so-called process philosophy or ontology of processes attributes ontological primacy to changes and processes as opposed to the emphasis on being static in the goal. traditionally dominant substance physics.

Ontological problems

The philosopher Willard van Orman Quine presented what he called "the ontological problem" in his article On What Is There:

A curious feature of the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be formulated in two Spanish monosyllables: «What is there?». It can also be answered in one word: “Everything”, and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is just saying that there is what there is. There is room for discrepancies in particular cases; and thus the issue has persisted over the centuries.

In general, each of these "particular cases" presents a different problem. Since the second half of the XX century, the prevailing naturalism has determined that metaphysical debates are mainly about the existence or not of everything that seems to conflict with the description of the world provided by the most successful scientific theories. This is reflected in the choice of some of the cases mentioned below:

• Abstract Entities: It is widely accepted that ideas are conceived as articulated by the cognition of each individual in one of two categories: as abstract entities, or as concrete entities. The numbers, sets and concepts are some examples of entities that intuitively classify as abstract, while the planet Venus, this tree and that person are intuitive examples of specific entities. However, there is still no accepted criterion for deciding when an entity is abstract and when specific, apart from intuition. Furthermore, there is no agreement as to whether abstract entities even exist, and where they exist, about what they exist.
• Common sense entities: When we find a chair, should we say that what is in the world is a chair? Or would it be more correct to say that what is, strictly speaking, is a lot of molecules? Or maybe a lot of atoms? This argument can be extended to many other common sense entities.
• Universals: Universals (also called properties, attributes or qualities) are the supposed referents of the preached as "green", "green", "friend", or "insect". The existence of universals is postulated to justify our way of speaking about individuals. For example, we are justified in saying of a plant that "is green", because the plant possesses the universal Greenor alternatively because of the universal Green is present on the floor. In addition, we can say of several things that "are all green," because the universal Green, being something different from things, is, however, present in all of them. The problem of universals is whether universals exist, and if so, what is their nature: if they exist in things (in re), or regardless of them (ante rem), or in our minds, to mention some positions.
• Mind: In opening a head, what we see is not a mind, with thoughts, ideas and memories, but matter. Will it be that mental is an illusion, and that everything that we describe today in mental terms can be reduced to the physical processes that science observes? Or is it that mental is something effectively existing, immaterial and unobservable? For a little more discussion, see The mind-body problem.
• Hoods: At first glance, the holes are "made of nothing." How then is it possible to refer to them as common objects? How is it possible to perceive them?What? Do we understand?

Problem of universals

Mind-body problem

This section is a mind-body problem extract.[chuckles]edit]

Diagram of different approaches to solving the mind-body problem.

In spirit philosophy and cognitive science, the mind-body problem is the problem of explaining the relationship between the mind (soul for some authors) and the matter: how it is that mental or subjective states (e.g. sensations, beliefs, decisions, memories) explain to, interact with, or overcome the substances and processes of the world of objects studied by science. It is therefore an ontological problem; while the problem of other minds can be understood as its epistemic counterpart.

The problem was described by René Descartes in the seventeenth century, and by the aristotelian philosophers, in the philosophy of Avicena, and in the earlier Asian traditions. A variety of ontologies have been proposed; most of them dualists (such as Cartesian) or monists. Dualism holds a distinction between the material and mental spheres; it can become the latter something supernatural. Monism argues that there is only one reality, substance or unifying essence in whose terms everything can be explained.

The mind-body problem is closely linked to intentionality, mental causality, the difficult problem of consciousness, the problem of free will, the significance of symbols, the identity of the individual, the problem of other minds, etc.

The absence of an identifiable causal interaction between the non-physical mind and its physical extension has proved to be problematic for the dualism of substances, and many philosophers of the contemporary mind think that the psyche is not something separate from the body. Non- Cartesian and non-idealist positions also gain ground in scientific circles. This has helped the advent of sociobiology, computing, evolutionary psychology, cognitive revolution and the evidence of neuroscience that reveal the dependence of mental phenomena on bodily substrates. Still, the mind-body problem is considered to remain open and far from being buried. Indeed, philosophers of materialistic court such as David Chalmers and Colin McGinn warn that some of the questions raised could be unfriendly to scientific explanation or any other kind. Others like Daniel Dennett give more optimistic forecasts, without failing to recognize it as a problem.

Types of ontologies

Ontological theories can be divided into several types according to their theoretical commitments. Particular ontological theories or types of theories are often called "ontologies" (singular or plural). This usage contrasts with the meaning of "ontology" (singular only) as a branch of philosophy: the science of being in general.

Flat vs polycategorical vs hierarchical

One way to divide ontologies is by the number of basic categories they use. Single-categorical ontologies hold that there is only one basic category, while polycategorical ontologies imply that there are several different basic categories. Another way of dividing ontologies is through the notion of ontological hierarchy. Hierarchical ontologies (hierarchical ontologies) assert that some entities exist at a more fundamental level and that other entities depend on them. Flat ontologies (flat ontologies), in contrast, deny such privileged status to any entity. Jonathan Schaffer provides an overview of these positions by distinguishing between flat (non-hierarchical) ontologies, classified (sorted ontologies) (non-hierarchical polycategorical) and ordered ontologies (hierarchical polycategorical).

Flat ontologies are only interested in the difference between existence and non-existence. They are flat because every flat ontology can be represented by a simple set containing all the entities to which this ontology commits. An influential exposition of this approach comes from Willard Van Orman Quine, which is why it has been dubbed the Quinean approach to meta-ontology. This perspective does not deny that existing entities can be further subdivided and can have various relationships. each. These issues are issues for the more specific sciences, but they do not belong to ontology in the Quinean sense.

Polycategorical ontologies are concerned with categories of being. Each polycategorical ontology postulates a number of categories. These categories are exclusive and exhaustive: every existing entity belongs to exactly one category. A recent example of a polycategorical ontology is E. J. Lowe's four-category ontology. The four categories are object, sort, mode, and attribute ( object, kind, mode and attribute). The fourfold structure is based on two distinctions. The first distinction is between substantial entities (objects and genres) and non-substantial entities (modes and attributes). The second distinction is between particular entities (objects and modes) and universal entities (genres and attributes). Reality is built through the interaction of entities belonging to different categories: particular entities instantiate universal entities and non-substantial entities characterize substantial entities.

Hierarchical ontologies are interested in the degree of fundamentality of the entities they posit. Its main goal is to discover which entities are fundamental and how non-fundamental entities depend on them. The concept of fundamentality is generally defined in terms of metaphysical grounding. Fundamental entities are different from non-fundamental entities because they are not based on other entities. For example, sometimes elementary particles are held to be more fundamental than the macroscopic objects (such as chairs and tables) that they compose. This is a statement about the grounding relationship between microscopic and macroscopic objects. Schaffer's priority monism is a recent form of a hierarchical ontology. He argues that at the most fundamental level there is only one thing: the world as a whole. This thesis does not deny our commonsense intuition that the various objects we encounter in our everyday affairs, such as cars or other people, exist. He only denies that these objects have the most fundamental form of existence. An example of a hierarchical ontology in continental philosophy comes from Nicolai Hartmann. He states that reality is made up of four levels: the still, the biological, the psychological, and the spiritual. These levels form a hierarchy in the sense that the higher levels depend on the lower levels, while the lower levels they are indifferent to the higher levels.

Ontologies of things vs ontologies of facts

Thing ontologies (thing ontologies) and fact ontologies) are single-category ontologies: both hold that all fundamental entities belong to the same category. They disagree on whether this category is the category of things or of facts. A catchphrase for ontologies of facts comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein: "The world is the totality of facts, not things" 34;.

One difficulty in characterizing this dispute is clarifying what things and facts are, and how they differ from each other. Things are commonly contrasted with the properties and relations they instantiate. Facts, on the other hand, are often characterized as having these things and properties/relations as constituents. This is reflected in a rough linguistic characterization of this difference, in which the subjects and objects of a statement refer to things while the statement as a whole refers to a fact.

Rheism in continental philosophy is a form of ontology of things. Franz Brentano developed a version of rheism in his later philosophy. He held that there are only concrete particular things. Things can exist in two ways: as space-time bodies or as temporary souls. Brentano was aware of the fact that many common sense expressions seem to refer to entities that have no place in his ontology, such as properties or intentional objects. That is why he developed a method to paraphrase these expressions in order to avoid these ontological compromises.

David Malet Armstrong is a well-known proponent of the ontology of facts. He and his followers refer to facts as states of affairs.States of affairs are the basic building blocks of his ontology: they have particulars and universals as their constituents, but are primary relative to particulars and universals.. States of affairs have an ontologically independent existence, while "particulars without properties and universals without instance are false abstractions".

Constituent ontologies vs. blob theories

Constituent ontologies (constituent ontologies) and blob theories, sometimes called relational ontologies, deal with the internal structure of objects. Constituent ontologies hold that objects have an internal structure made up of constituents. This is denied by blob theories: they hold that objects are "blobs" no structure.

Bundle theories are examples of constituent ontologies. Package theorists claim that an object is nothing more than the properties it "has". According to this theory, a normal apple could be characterized as a package of red color, roundness, sweetness, etc. Package theorists disagree about the nature of packaged properties. Some affirm that these properties are universal, while others maintain that they are particular, the so-called "tropos".

Class nominalism, on the other hand, is a form of blob theory. Class nominalists hold that properties are classes of things. To instantiate a property is simply to be a member of the corresponding class. Therefore, properties are not constituents of the objects that have them.

Etymology

Ogdoas Scholastica (1606) by Jacob Lorhard, the first text with the word "ontology".

The first to use the expression «ontology» in a philosophical sense was the German philosopher Jacob Lorhard in his work Ogdoas Scholastica (1606) followed by Rodolfo Goclenius in his work Lexicon philosophicum, (Philosophical Lexicon, in Spanish), in the year 1613 with Greek characters. It is stated there that ontology is the philosophy of beings.

After various uses and its conversion to Latin characters, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz used the expression in his book Introductio ad Encyclopaediam arcanam (1683) and defines it as "the science of what is and of nothingness, of beings and non-beings, of things and their modes, of substance and of accident.

Already as a technical term, it is found in the work Ontologia sive de ente in genere by Jean Le Clerc published in 1692 and the German philosopher Christian Wolff popularized it by defining it as "the science of beings in general, insofar as it exists». He affirms that he uses a demonstrative or deductive method and analyzes the predicates that correspond to beings as beings. All these senses contributed to identify it in practice with metaphysics.

History

Hindu Philosophy

Ontology has played a role in the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy since the first millennium BCE. C. Samkhya philosophy considers that the universe consists of two independent realities: puruṣa (pure consciousness, without content) and prakṛti (matter). The substance dualism between puruṣa and prakṛti is similar, but not identical, to the substance dualism between mind and body which, following the works of Descartes, has been central to many disputes in the Western philosophical tradition. Samkhya considers the mind to be the subtle part of prakṛti. It is made up of three faculties: the sensory mind (manas), the intellect (buddhi) and the ego (ahaṁkāra). These faculties perform various functions, but by themselves they are incapable of producing consciousness, which belongs to a distinct ontological category and for which only puruṣa is responsible. The Yoga school agrees with the Samkhya philosophy on the fundamental dualism between puruṣa and prakṛti, but differs from Samkhya's atheistic position by incorporating the concept of a "personal, but essentially inactive deity" or "personal god" (Ishvara). These two schools contrast with Advaita Vedanta, which is committed to a strict form of monism by holding that the apparent plurality of things is an illusion (Maya) that hides the true unity of reality in its most fundamental level (Brahman).

Old Age

Aristotle's disciples first used the term metaphysics to refer to what their teacher described as "first philosophy," later known as ontology. Ontology is the investigation of being as it is, or of being in general, beyond anything in particular that is or exists. Some philosophers, especially from Plato's school, hold that all nouns refer to existing entities. Others claim that nouns do not always name entities, but rather offer a form of reference to a collection of objects or events. In this sense, the mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person.

Middle Ages

Medieval ontology was strongly influenced by the teachings of Aristotle. Thinkers of this period often drew on Aristotelian categories such as substance, act and potency, or matter and form to formulate their own theories. Important ontologists of this time include Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.

Thomas Aquinas

Fundamental to Thomas Aquinas' ontology is his distinction between essence and existence: all entities are conceived as compounds of essence and existence. The essence of a thing is what this thing is, meaning the definition of this thing. God has a special status, since He is the only entity whose essence is identical to its existence. But for all other finite entities there is a real distinction between essence and existence. This distinction manifests itself, for example, in our ability to understand the essence of something without knowing its existence. existence as an act of being that actualizes the power given by the essence. Different things have different essences, which impose different limits on the corresponding act of being. Paradigmatic examples of compounds of essence and existence are material substances such as cats or trees. Aquinas incorporates Aristotle's distinction between matter and form by holding that the essence of material things, as opposed to the essence of immaterial things like angels, is composition. of its matter and form. Thus, for example, the essence of a marble statue would be the composition of the marble (its matter) and the figure it has (its form). The shape is universal, since substances made of different matter can have the same shape. The forms of a substance can be divided into substantial and accidental forms. A substance can survive an accidental change in form, but ceases to exist when the substantial form is changed.

Modern Age

Ontology is seen more and more as a separate domain of philosophy in the modern period. Many ontological theories of this period were rationalist in the sense that they viewed ontology largely as a deductive discipline stemming from a small set of first principles or axioms, a position best exemplified by Baruch Spinoza and Christian Wolff. This rationalism in metaphysics and ontology was strongly opposed by Immanuel Kant, who insisted that many claims arrived at in this way must be dismissed as going beyond any possible experience that could justify them. Kant can claim — transferring this notion to his own philosophy — that ontology is the study of a priori concepts that reside in understanding and have their use in experience, taking the notion towards a more immanent meaning.^{[quote required]}

Discards

Rene Descartes' ontological distinction between mind and body has been one of the most influential parts of his philosophy. In his view, minds are thinking things, while bodies are extended things. The thought and the extension are two attributes that each come in various modes of being. The modes of thought include judgments, doubts, volitions, sensations and emotions, while the forms of material things are modes of extension. Modes come with a lesser degree of reality, since they depend for their existence on a substance. Substances, on the other hand, can exist by themselves. Descartes' substance dualism asserts that every finite substance is a thinking substance. or an extended substance. This position does not imply that minds and bodies really are separate from each other, which would defy the intuition that we have both a body and a mind. Instead, it implies that minds and bodies can, at least in principle, be separate, since they are distinct substances and are therefore capable of existing independently. The long-standing concern for substance dualism since its inception has been to explain how minds and bodies can causally interact with each other, as they apparently do, when volition causes an arm to move or when light falling on the retina causes a visual impression.

Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza is well known for his monism of substance: the thesis that there is only one substance. He refers to this substance as "God or Nature", emphasizing both his pantheism and his naturalism. This substance has an infinite number of attributes, which he defines as "that which the intellect perceives of the substance as constituting its essence". Of these attributes, only two are accessible to the human mind: thought and extension. Modes are properties of a substance that are derived from its attributes and therefore only have a dependent form of existence. Spinoza sees everyday things, such as rocks, cats, or ourselves, as mere modes and thus opposes the traditional Aristotelian and Cartesian conception of categorizing them as substances. The modes make up deterministic systems in which the different modes are linked to each other as cause and effect. Each deterministic system corresponds to an attribute: one for extensive things, another for thinking things, etc. Causal relationships only occur within a system while different systems function in parallel without causally interacting with each other. Spinoza calls the system of modes Natura naturata ("created nature") and opposes it to Natura naturans ("creative nature"), the attributes responsible for the modes. Everything in Spinoza's system is necessary: there are no contingent entities. This is so because the attributes are themselves necessary and because the mode system is derived from them.

Wolff

Christian Wolff defines ontology as the science of being in general. He considers it a part of metaphysics, in addition to cosmology, psychology and natural theology. According to Wolff, it is a deductive science, knowable a priori and based on two fundamental principles: the principle of non-contradiction ("it cannot happen that the same thing is and is not") and the principle of sufficient reason ("nothing exists without a sufficient reason why it exists instead of not existing"). beings are defined by their determinations or predicates, which cannot imply a contradiction. Determinations come in three types: essentialia, attributes, and modes. Essentialia define the nature of a being and, therefore, are necessary properties of this being. The attributes are determinations that derive from the essentialia and are equally necessary, in contrast to the modes, which are merely contingent. Wolff conceives existence as a single determination among others, which a being can lack. Ontology is interested in being in general, not only in real being. But all beings, existing or not, have a sufficient reason. The sufficient reason of things without real existence consists of all the determinations that constitute the essential nature of this thing. Wolff refers to this as a "reason for being" and he contrasts it with a & # 34; reason for becoming & # 34;, which explains why some things have real existence.

Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was an advocate of metaphysical voluntarism: he regards the will as the underlying and ultimate reality. Reality as a whole only consists of a will, which is equated with the Kantian thing-in-itself. Like the Kantian thing-in-itself, the will exists outside of space and time. But, unlike the Kantian thing in itself, the will has an experiential component: it appears in the form of effort, desire, feeling, etc. The multiplicity of things that we find in our daily experiences, such as trees or cars, are mere appearances that lack independent existence of the observer. Schopenhauer describes them as objectifications of the will. These objectifications occur in different "steps", which correspond to the Platonic forms. All objectifications are based on the will. This foundation is governed by the principium individuationis, which allows a multiplicity of individual things scattered in space and time to be based on the single will.

20th century

The dominant approaches to ontology in the 20th century were phenomenology, linguistic analysis, and naturalism. The phenomenological ontology, exemplified by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, bases its method on the description of experience. Linguistic analysis assigns language a central role for ontology, as seen, for example, in Rudolf Carnap's thesis that the truth value of existence claims depends on the linguistic framework in which they are based. that they are made. Naturalism gives a prominent position to the natural sciences for the purpose of finding and evaluating ontological claims. This position is exemplified by Quine's ontological method, which involves analyzing the ontological commitments of scientific theories.

Husserl

Edmund Husserl sees ontology as a science of essences. The sciences of essences are contrasted with factual sciences (factual sciences): the former are knowable a priori and provide the foundation for the latter, which are knowable a posteriori. Ontology as a science of essences is not interested in the real facts, but in the essences themselves, whether they have instances or not. Husserl distinguishes between formal ontology, which investigates the essence of objectivity in general, and regional ontologies, which study the regional essences that are shared by all entities belonging to the region. The regions correspond to the highest genera of concrete entities: material nature, personal consciousness, and interpersonal spirit. Husserl's method of studying ontology and the sciences of essence in general is called variac eidetic ion. It consists of imagining an object of the type investigated and varying its features. The changed feature is inessential for this type if the object can survive its change, otherwise it belongs to the type essence. For example, a triangle is still a triangle if one of its sides is extended, but it is no longer a triangle if a fourth side is added. The regional ontology consists of applying this method to the essences corresponding to the highest genera.

Heidegger

At the center of Martin Heidegger's philosophy is the notion of ontological difference: the difference between being as such and specific beings >. He accuses the philosophical tradition of having forgotten this distinction, which has led to the error of understanding being as such as a kind of ultimate entity, for example as "idea, energeia, substance, monad or will to power". Heidegger tries to rectify this error in his own "fundamental ontology" focusing instead on the sense of being, a project that is similar to contemporary meta-ontology. One method of achieving this is through the study of the human being, or Dasein (Being-there), in Heidegger's terminology. Thus, he develops an original ontology called "analytic of existence" that is in charge of discovering "the constitution of the being of existence". Ontology then refers to the conditions of possibility of existences or to being itself in its original opening. The reason for studying ontology through the human being is that we already have a pre-ontological understanding of being that shapes how we experience the world. Phenomenology can be used to make this implicit understanding explicit, but it has to be accompanied by hermeneutics to avoid distortions due to forgetfulness of being. In his later philosophy, Heidegger attempted to reconstruct the " history of being" in order to show how the different periods in the history of philosophy were dominated by different conceptions of being. His goal is to recover the original experience of being present in the thought of early Greek thinkers that was clouded by later philosophers. Heidegger criticizes the ontology of tradition as "onto-theology". In addition, he insists on differentiating metaphysics from ontology, arguing that they are radically different, since the first confuses being with being, while the second part precisely from the fact that they are different.

Hartman

Nicolai Hartmann is a 20th century lowercase philosopher within the tradition of continental philosophy. He interprets ontology as Aristotle's science of being qua being: the science of the most general characteristics of entities, usually called categories, and of the relationships between them. According to Hartmann, the most general categories are the moments of being (existence and essence), modes of being (reality and ideality) and modalities of being (possibility, actuality and necessity). Every entity has both existence and essence. Reality and ideality, on the other hand, are two categories disjunctive: each entity is real or ideal. Ideal entities are universal, repeatable, and always existent, while real entities are individual, unique, and destructible. Ideal entities include mathematical objects and values. The modalities of being are divided into absolute modalities (actuality and non-actuality) and relative modalities (possibility, impossibility and necessity). Relative modalities are relative in the sense that they depend on absolute modalities: something is possible, impossible, or necessary because something else is actual. Hartmann affirms that reality is composed of four levels (inanimate, biological, psychological and spiritual) that form a Starting from a critique of the notion of ontology as metaphysics and with it of all scholasticism, Hartmann affirms that ontology is actually the critique that allows us to discover the limits of metaphysics and what contents can be considered rational or intelligible.

Carnap

Rudolf Carnap proposed that the truth value of ontological claims about the existence of entities depends on the linguistic framework in which these claims are made: they are internal to the framework. As such, they are often trivial in the sense of that only depend on the rules and definitions within this framework. For example, it follows analytically from the rules and definitions within the mathematical framework that numbers exist. The problem Carnap saw with traditional ontologs is that they try to make framework-independent or external claims about what is actually the case. Such claims are at best pragmatic considerations about which framework to choose, and at worst totally nonsense, according to Carnap. For example, there is no fact about whether realism or idealism is true, their truth depends on the framework adopted. The job of philosophers is not to discover what things exist by themselves, but to "conceptual engineering" 3. 4; (conceptual engineering): creating interesting frameworks and exploring the consequences of adopting them. The choice of framework is guided by practical considerations such as convenience or fecundity, since there is no notion of truth independent of the frame.

Kine

The notion of ontological commitment plays a central role in Willard Van Orman Quine's contributions to ontology. A theory is ontologically committed to an entity if that entity must exist for the theory to be true. Quine proposed that the best way to determine this is by translating the theory in question into first-order predicate logic. Of special interest in this translation are the logical constants known as existential quantifiers, whose meaning corresponds to expressions such as "exist..." or "for some...". They are used to bind the variables of the following expression to the quantifier. The ontological commitments of the theory then correspond to the variables bound by the existential quantifiers. This approach is summed up in Quine's famous saying that "being is be the value of a variable". This method alone is not sufficient for ontology, since it depends on a theory to result in ontological commitments. Quine proposed that we should base our ontology on our best scientific theory. Several followers of Quine's method chose to apply it to different fields, for example to "everyday conceptions expressed in natural language".

Additional bibliography

• Well, Gustavo (1972). Materialist testing. Madrid: Taurus.
• Reinhardt Grossmann (2007). The existence of the world: introduction to ontology. Technos. ISBN 978-84-309-4536-8.
• Hartmann, Nicolai. Ontology. Translation by José Gaos. Mexico: Fund of economic culture.
• Heidegger, Martin (1998). Ontology. Hermeneutics of feasibility. Translation by Jaime Aspiunza. Madrid: Alianza.
• Heidegger, Martin (1988). The onto-theo-logic constitution of metaphysics. In Identity and Difference'. Translation by Helena Cortés and Arturo Leyte (Bilingual Edition of Arturo Leyte edition). Barcelona: Anthropos.
• Lucia Herrerías Guerra (1996). I hope to be in the truth: the ontological search of Paul Ricoeur. Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana. ISBN 9788876527081.
• Husserl, Edmund (2005). Ideas concerning pure phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. Translated by Antonio Zirión Q. (2nd edition). UNAM, Institute of Philosophical Research. ISBN 9703226663.
• Lavelle, Louis (1953). Introduction to ontology. Translation by José Gaos. Mexico: Fund for Economic Culture.
• Antonio Millán-Puelles (2002). Philosophical lexicon. Rialp Editions. ISBN 9788432134166. Archived from the original on 12 February 2012. Consultation on 1 August 2010.
• Fisherman, Augustus (1966). Ontology. Buenos Aires: Losada.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul (1984). The Being and the Nothing. Phenomenological ontology test. Translation by Juan Valmar, revised by Celia Amorós. Madrid: Alliance / Losada.