Questions tagged [ontology]
Ontology is the study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.
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Does Kant implicitly commit the paralogism of pure reason when saying that to have a representation it is necessary to accompany it with 'I think'?
In Caygill's Kant Dictionary entry of 'I Think' there is this part:
Kant further claims that 'I think' is the necessary vehicle/form/accompaniment of experience: to have a representation it is ...
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What is the difference between a " particular" and an " individual being "? (Ontology)
The standard ontological classification distinguishes:
(1) particulars and universals
(2) concrete and abstract entities.
I'm wondering what place to attribute to " individuals" in this ...
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Are there any publications that attempt to give a formal ontological definition of the Christian Trinity?
Are there any publications in the field of Philosophy of Religion that have attempted to provide a formal ontological definition of the Christian God as portrayed by the doctrine of the Trinity?
Take ...
user48437
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How to understand Prime matter?
In the Aristotle-Aquinas tradition prime matter is the thing that underlies all other things in the world. It is described as completely indeterminate-pure potentiality, it was not created and cannot ...
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Regarding objects being concrete and properties being abstract
For those who believe that objects are concrete things and properties are abstract things, what do you make of sensory properties?
Our brains perceive sensory qualities first and build (concepts of) &...
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How does Hegel's Ontology overcome issues in Spinoza's?
I'm trying to write a paper and I've tried to reconstruct an argument about this on my own with no luck so far. It's about Hegel's criticism of Spinoza.
As far as I understand, Hegel's main critique ...
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Is Heidegger's "Being" a class template or a random variable taking realizations?
I have a fairly strong background in math and programming as it is my daily work. I have recently started getting interested in philosophy and often has the habit of drawing analogy between ...
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What is the ontological status of Plato's Demiurge?
I've done some searching and have found that he (it?) is the anthropomorphization of the deliberate Intellect's intent (SEP: Plato's Timaeus). I understand that he is neither an idea nor an idea's ...
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What precedents are there for the triple-ism of Roger Penrose?
In his The Road to Reality, Roger Penrose espouses three distinct realities - the physical, mental and mathematical.
The physical and mental are basically good old dualism, although he is an atheist ...
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To what extent is the notion of "common" of philosophical interest?
The 2021 theme for a french competitive philosophical exam is: "the common". I'm not sure the expression really makes sense in English. In French, it is the adjective "commun" ( ...
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Duns Scotus : how can the " concept of being" be univocal without there being a nature common to God and to creatures?
Source : Paul Vincent Spade, Survey Of Medieval Philoosphy (https://pvspade.com/Logic/index.html)
Dunst Scotus is said to hold the thesis of univocity of being: i.e. the thesis according to which the ...
user37859
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What happened to ( aristotelian) substantial forms in cartesian ontology? On which ground ( metaphysical or physical) are they rejected?
In aristotelian philosophy, there are no bare particulars ( contrary to what is the case in Plato, according to P.V. Spade) but internally structured ( substantial) particulars in which 2 "parts"/...
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Has Alexandre Grothendieck ever expounded a particular stance on metaphysics or ontology?
It seems that in Recoltes et Semailles, he does go into quite a bit of philosophizing. the only thing of relevance I've found is that he notes how Riemann "in passing" said how he thought perhaps the "...
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Understanding 'existence' and 'being' in debates about ordinary objects
Quine has brought forward his definition of existence: 'To be is to be the value of a bound variable.' But has also taught us that the sciences ultimately determine what actually exists contrary to ...
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Difference between Carnap and Quine's views
Could someone explain to me, in easy language, what the main differences are between Carnap and Quine's views regarding internal / external questions and realism? Quine called Carnap a Platoist, yet I ...
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Is Simondon's ontogenesis compatible with Badiou's ontology?
Is Simondon's ontogenesis compatible with Badiou's ontology?
Simondon's belief is that an individual can only be understood as an individuation, presupposing a pre-individual metastable reality, ...
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Ontology over time
Looking for any recommended references for this topic, I was recommended a good book on logic previously on here, and found it extremely enlightening, mainly how we deal with issues like the ship of ...
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Do things correspond to carvings of reality?
I have found many papers about “carving reality at its joints” but all of them discussed carving reality into kinds, supposed to cluster things, themselves always considered as already given. Though I ...
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Markus Gabriel's ontology and the non-existence of the world
Markus Gabriel proposes a permissive ontology ("New Realism") according to, if there exists a certain "field of sense" in which an entity appears, the entity exists. Even fictional ...
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Is a complex eternal first cause less likely than a simple eternal first cause?
I have seen this argument posed by people like Dawkins et. al, but is this actually true? Many have pointed to how complex things in nature generally come from simpler origins, but clearly, this isn't ...
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Positive vs negative classes in ontology
I am interested in the nature of ontological classification and whether there exists some form of accepted terminology to distinguish classes that are 'positive' (matching characteristics) and classes ...
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What is an object's properties?
What can we consider an object's properties, for example, when can we consider an object's properties as 'changing'? For example, if I move an object from my desk to my table, has it changed? If I ...
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Are theories about the universe or ontological realities that cannot be yet proven considered to be metaphysics theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Metaphysical_theories
Are theories about the universe or ontological realities that cannot be yet proven considered to be metaphysics theory?
I was wondering why ...
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Spinoza: what would be a concrete example of a thing that "is in" another thing
Spinoza talks about substance and its modifications. Since God is the only substance, it follows that everything else that exists is modifications of modifications of modifications ... etc.
As I ...
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How to correctly understand the positions of ontological nihilism?
Lately I have been investigating ontological nihilism. However, different sources give completely different definitions of this philosophical position, which I have divided into two main groups.
The ...
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Brute facts and the burden of proof
I'm trying my best to understand Della Rocca's article "PSR", which I believe convincingly shows that that one cannot reasonably hold that some facts are brute while others are not without a ...
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Motivations for ontological pluralism – suggested reading?
I’m looking for suggested reading on ontological pluralism.
There are so many contested entities (?) like numbers, holes, the poems of Lord Byron, universals, various types of non-existent objects (...
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What does Quine's ontological method of paraphrasing achieve?
W. V. O. Quine in "On What There Is?" denies the existence of universals. There are red things, like a fire truck (f), a tomato (t), a red umbrella (u). But the phrase "They have ...
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Why are concepts without intuitions blind?
I think at this point I understand all the transcendental arguments of CPR except this one - and probably this could considerably change my understanding of Kant as a whole.
Here is my confusion.
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Relationism, Substantivalism, and Simultaneity?
I've been breaking my head open lately over special relativity and its conception of spacetime's dynamical as well as kinematical features. One thing that has stuck in my head is that of whether the ...
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Perdurantism applied to non-physical objects
I have recently been reading up a lot on perdurantism aka four dimensionalism including papers by Rea, Sider, Bittner and Donnelly among others and I was interested in knowing whether there was any ...
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Is there a logical argument for the limit of knowledge?
It is justifiable to assert that certain knowledge could not be disseminated without the invention of writing. One could say that humanity needed the knowledge of writing before further knowledge ...
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Looking for references regarding the history of metaphysics, and specially of ontology
Although many histories of ethics, of esthetics or of logic are available, it seems more difficult to find histories regarding other domains of philosophy. This is the case for epistemology and for ...
user37859
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Grounding without fundamental relations
Philosophers from Leibniz to John Heil have proposed the reduction/elimination of relations to non-relational features of their relata; essentially, they seek to formulate an ontology which does not ...
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Can an eternalist think that pastness and futureness are properties?
I take an eternalist to be someone who believes there are no past/future things, it all exists "at once". I understand the position as it applies to concrete objects, but I am not so clear on what the ...
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Russell on Negative Facts
Okay. I am reading Russell's paper "On Propositions: What They are and How They Mean". Since the truth or falsehood of a belief depends upon a fact to which the belief "refers", and propositions are ...
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What was Putnam's position re truth and/or word/world relationship at the time of his death.
The formidable philosopher of science and mathematics, Hillary Putnam, died last year, at 89, shortly [relatively] after his retirement. His was an intellectually peripatetic career. Though he ...
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Just what is it that makes todays theoretical posits so different, so appealing?
... from those of yester-years, or yester-millenias?
Westerhoff, writes in his transaltion of the Nagarjunas Madhyamakarika (Verses on the Middle Way) that:
The idea of fire-atoms as ultimately real ...
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Blue Plane vs Pink Plane - existing philosophical category?
In The Act of Creation (Arkana) 1964, Arkana Reissue Edition, Paperback, ISBN 0140191917 by Arthur Koestler he sets up a Contrast between the Pink Plane and the Blue Plane.
In it he describes the ...
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What is the difference between the “thing in itself” and noumena?
“Things in themselves” and noumena are similar in Kantian metaphysics (Critique of Pure Reason, mostly) and interchangeable much of the time. The phenomena/noumena divide is integral to Kantian ...
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How to start Philosophy and find the branches that are related to my questions?
From Wikipedia:
Ontology: philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.
Epistemology: study of the nature ...
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Do models of Cartesian closed logic physically exist?
Cartesian closed logics, also known as simple type theories or simply-typed lambda calculi, are ubiquitous; we use sentential logic (WP, nLab) all the time in philosophy and law, and doxastic logic to ...
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HEIDEGGER SCHOLARS NOMENCLATURE PUZZLING
Heideggerian scholars keep utilizing the phrase "background practices" as a substitute or equivalent for being.
Background practices are things like instinctive social behavior that is ...
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What did Kant have to say about atomism?
I've been trying to understand whether on not Kant accepts the atomic model (that matter is composed of smallest pieces) based on his writings in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.
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Aristotle on Plato's realm of forms
I am familiar with Plato's realm of forms. However, I have not read much of Aristotle except for the Nicomachean Ethics. In a nutshell, how does Aristotle pick up on Plato's forms and where would I ...
user63528
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Is 'a level of quantity' a poor definition of 'real number'?
I was thinking about how we define numbers with respect to their uses, and came up with the definition of 'a level of quantity' which can have a different physical consequence for each quantity ...
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Normative philosophy vs descriptive philosophy
I am making the question in simple terms to avoid logical ambiguity.
IS normative philosophy(what should be) a subset of descriptive philosophy (What is) ?
Is morality/ethics beauty/happiness is also ...
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What is Plotinus' theory (of graduationism) that inspired Augustine about?
I want to know what Plotinus' gradualism is exactly about. I've heard in a lecture about Augustine being inspired by that theory, but can't seem to find anything about this. Is this gradualism just ...
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Ontic/Ontological as parallel to a posteriori/a priori?
Heidegger makes the distinction between the ontic (concerning beings themselves) and the ontological (the being of beings, being as such).
Would it be wise to say that the ontic covers the contingent ...
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Do phrases like “a bunch of simples arranged chair-wise” advance our understanding of ontology?
In the popular YouTube video “Do Chairs Exist?”, the presenter eventually advances the idea that chairs do not exist, but that what we think as a chair is “a bunch of simples arranged chair-wise.”
My ...
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