Ontology Early History Of Ontology Subject Relationship Object

The concept of ontology originated in early Greece from Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle described ontology as "the science of being qua being." The word 'qua' means 'with regard to the aspect of'. According to this theory, then, ontology is the science of being with regard to the aspect of being, or the study of beings insofar as they exist. More precisely, ontology concerns determining what categories of being are fundamental and asks whether, and in what sense, the items in those categories can be said to "be."

2 Subject, relationship, object

"What exists", "What is", "What am I", "What is describing this to me", are all examples of questions about being, and highlight the most basic problem in ontology: finding a subject, a relationship, and an object to talk about. During the Enlightenment the view of René Descartes that " cogito ergo sum" (or "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 " — asking "who is reading that sentence about thinking and being?" — and generally concluded that it must be God.

This answer, however, became increasingly unsatisfactory in the 20th century19th century 20th century 21st century more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901- 2000 in the sense of the Gre as philosophy of mathematicsPhilosophy of mathematics is that branch of philosophy which attempts to answer questions such as: "why is mathematics useful in describing nature?", "in which sense, if any, do mathematical entities such as numbers exist?" and "why and how are mathematic and philosophy of scienceThe philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy which studies the philosophical foundations, presumptions and implications of science both of the natural sciences like physics and biology and the social sciences such as psychology and economics. and even particle physicsParticle physics is a branch of physics that studies the elementary constituents of matter and radiation, and the interactions between them. It is also called high energy physics because many elementary particles do not occur under normal circumstances in explored some of the most fundamental barriers to knowing about being.

3 Body, affordance, environment

Schools of subjectivism, objectivism and relativism had existed at various times in the 20th century, and the postmodernists and body philosophers tried to reframe all these questions in terms of bodies taking some specific 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 — as studied by biology, ecology, and cognitive science.

A key theory was that of J. J. Gibson, which held that the (subject) animal did not perceive other (object) elements of its environment directly, but rather, strictly in terms of opportunities or potentials, " affordances", relevant to its own ecological niche within that environment.

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", supposedly less prone to bad abstractions. Others, mostly philosophers, tried to dig into the word.

4 Being

A being is above all the most fundamental state of the Existence. The "is-ness". It is anything that can be said to 'be' in various senses of the word 'be'. The verb to be has many different meanings and can therefore be rather ambiguous. Because "to be" has so many different meanings, there are, accordingly, many different ways of being.

5 Some basic questions

Different philosophers make different lists of the fundamental categories of being; one of the basic questions of ontology is: "What are the fundamental categories of being?"

This highlights one of the problems of the philosophical approach — it relies on continued investigation of categories, and has no clear way to stop asking. Whereas, in theology and library science and artificial intelligence, one typically adopts a relatively stable foundation ontology. This reflects a larger cosmology and probably morals, aesthetic examples or stories, by which foundation priorities have been set. In theology this is derived from a religion and its stable doctrines.

Here are a few more examples of ontological questions:

What is existence?
What are physical objects?
Is it possible to give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists?
What are an object's properties or relations and how are they related to the object itself?
Is existence a property?
When does an object go out of existence, as opposed to merely changing?

6 Some concepts

A few quintessential ontological concepts are:

The Problem of universals
The Problem of substance

7 Famous Ontologists

8 Related articles

9 External links

Aristotle's definition of a science of Being qua Being: ancient and modern interpretations

Metaphysics Ontology Knowledge representation

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1 Early History of Ontology