Ontology: what it is, its origin and its main authors

We explain what ontology is, its origin and its main authors. In addition, its relationship with metaphysics, its objectives and its problems.

Ontology is part of metaphysics and studies being in general.

What is ontology?

Ontology is the discipline that studies being, understood as a common characteristic of all things. Also known as general metaphysics, It is framed within philosophy and questions the meaning of being, the ways of classifying it and various ontological problems, which are discussions that arise when thinking about the existence of entities such as universality, necessity and possibility.

Throughout the history of philosophy, various authors, such as Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, have made ontology their main philosophical concern. However, It was Christian Wolff, during the 18th century, who was the first to popularize the term, defining it as the science of beings in general.. He was also the one who gave the definition of be as “the general of the entity”, that is, as the characteristic common to all things in a general sense.

Etymology: The word ontology has its origin in Greek all logoswhose literal translation is “study of the entity” or “study of what exists.”

Origin of ontology

Many thinkers have dedicated themselves to theorizing about ontology and its field of study.

Ontology according to Aristotle

In his book entitled MetaphysicsAristotle (384-322 BC) referred to ontology as the first philosophy. Understanding it as a form of metaphysics, he characterized his object of study as the “entity as an entity.” What made the entity an entity was precisely its essence, that is, being. For this reason, it is considered that Aristotle was the first to systematize the problem of being.

Aristotle further stated that form was the being of each thing and its first reality, and thus unified “being” with “essence.” For him, essence was what made things what they are. For example, the essence of a dog is what makes the dog a dog. In this way, the shape of things, like their being, was what allowed them to be distinguished from each other: a dog cannot have the shape (and therefore the essence) of a horse, otherwise it would not be a dog.

The definition of essence as form allowed ontology to separate being from entity, which facilitated the identification of entity with matter and being with form. Thus, these concepts were distinguished in such a clear way that the Aristotelian definition was maintained, with nuances, until contemporary philosophy.

Ontology in other authors

• Parmenides (530-460 BC)He was the first philosopher to open the way for reflection on being through his work. About naturea poem that deals with being and beings as “what is.”
• Heraclitus (540-480 BC). He was the one who introduced temporality and becoming to the question of being in his book About naturea name that it shares with Parmenides.
• Avicenna (980-1037). He was one of the first readers of Aristotle’s work during the Middle Ages, translating it into classical Arabic and incorporating it into Islamic theology.
• Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Taking Avicenna’s work as background, he introduced Aristotelian work to Christian theology. In his work Summa theologicacharacterized the Christian God through the traits of the Aristotelian being.
• René Descartes (1596-1650). He revolutionized modern metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy through his recovery of the concept of “substance,” a word he took to define real things that required nothing more than themselves to exist.
• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Through his work Ethicsanalyzed divine ontology, bringing together metaphysics and theology. This work earned him excommunication at the time, and his thought was revalued much later.
• Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)He explained the ontological universe through the concept of “monads,” which he believed were small metaphysical particles equivalent to atoms. He also reflected on contingency and necessity, that is, the fact that something could exist or not.
• Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Starting from the works of Aristotle and also those of Leibniz, Wolff took up and popularized the term ontology to speak of first philosophy or general metaphysics. He was the first to formally define ontology, thinking of it as the science of beings in general.
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)He defined metaphysics as an ontology concerned with synthetic knowledge. a priori of things, that is, what can be known independently of experience. Thus, he turned ontology to the study of the principles of understanding that make knowledge of things possible.

Ontology in the 20th century

Contemporary philosophy owes its conception of ontology fundamentally to the philosophy of the 20th century. Different authors worked with different approaches to the idea of ​​ontology, which were the basis for reaching the current conception. These are the most notable:

• Ontology according to Edmund Husserl (1859-1939). Husserl presented ontology as a science of essences. In this sense, he distinguished between two forms of ontology:
  • The formal ontology. It deals with formal essences and encompasses material ontology. Therefore, it implies all possible ontologies and is the foundation of all sciences.
  • The material ontology. It deals with material essences, that is, with regional ontologies. It is within the formal and is the foundation of the factual sciences.
• Ontology according to Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)Heidegger presented ontology as a fundamental ontology. In this way, he poses it as a metaphysics of existence, whose task is to discover the constitution of being. It is called fundamental because it allows us to reveal what constitutes the foundation of existence, that is, its finitude. The task of fundamental ontology, then, is the investigation of being as being, and not as a mere formal entity. This means that it thinks of the being in itself and separate from the rest of the entities, even when it is the foundation of these.
• Ontology according to Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950). Hartmann presented ontology as a discipline that seeks to recognize what is metaphysically insoluble (that is, what cannot be solved by metaphysics). Furthermore, he tried to think of a theory of being and reality that was not idealistic or transcendent, that is, outside classical metaphysical explanations.
• Ontology according to Jamés Feibleman (1904-1987), Stanislaw Leśniewski (1886-1939) and WVO Quine (1908-2000). These authors thought about ontology outside of traditional groups of philosophy, such as rationalism, phenomenology or existentialism. Feibleman presented a “finite” ontology (a series of formal postulates) that should mediate between the metaphysical and the positivist attitude. Leśniewski proposed an ontology of the theory and calculus of classes and relations, opposing it to propositional calculus. Quine, for his part, by dividing semantics into theory of reference and theory of signification, and limiting ontology to the former, he conceived of it as an ontology of a theory, and not as a general ontology.

Ontological problems

Ontological problems They have to do with the question about being or the meaning of what isThese are discussions that arise when thinking about the existence of different entities.

Some of the best-known ontological problems are:

• The problem of universals and particulars. The question is what kind of entities universals are and what entities have in common as sensible particulars, that is, as objects perceptible by the senses.
• The problem of abstract entities. It asks about the difference between concrete entities (existing in the physical world) and abstract entities (which are obtained through a mental process of abstraction).
• The problem of identity and persistence. It asks how an object can remain the same over time.
• The problem of mind-body dualism. It asks about the relationship between the mind or soul and matter.
• The problem or dilemma of holes. It questions the essence of holes (understood as a void in matter) and the possibility of expressing them through language.

Ontology and metaphysics

Ontology is part of metaphysics and is sometimes thought of as the same science. However, although they are similar, ontology is distinguished from metaphysics because it thinks about being in a more specific way than the latter and places it as the primary object of study. In this sense, Ontology is not metaphysics, but it is part of it.

The confusion between the two is due to the fact that most philosophers who have dealt with ontology have called it “general metaphysics” (as opposed to “special metaphysics”). Thus, although ontology is part of metaphysics, it is distinguished by its primary character compared to any other special form of metaphysics.

Ontology as general metaphysics was the first rational science par excellence. It was used to designate the study of all the problems that affect the knowledge of the “supreme” kinds of things, that is, those that go beyond accidental or temporal features.

It can be said, then, that there are two ways of understanding ontology:

• Ontology as the science of being itself, on which all other entities depend. This is the truly metaphysical meaning of ontology, as a science of existences.
• Ontology as a science that determines what entities have in common and what being consists ofThis is the meaning of pure ontology, as the science of essences.

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References

• Aristotle. (2018). Metaphysics. Gredos.
• Carpio, A. (1977). The meaning of the history of philosophy. Eudeba.
• Chateaubriand, O. (2020). Quine and ontology. Elenkhos, 3(2).
• Dieguez Lucena, AJ (1987). The relations between pure logic and formal ontology in Husserl’s philosophy. Themata. Philosophy Magazine, 427-38.
• Heidegger, M. (1980). Being and time. Fund of Economic Culture.
• Paredes Martín, M. del C. (2009). Phenomenology and ontology. Azafea. Philosophy Magazine, 6(1).