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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How does one differentiate epistemological and ontological claims?

I'm taking an introductory philosophy course and I find it fascinating. I can't really figure out an assignment though because I'm a bit foggy on what the difference between ontological and ...
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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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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 ...
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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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How is asymmetry of metaphor an important part of object-oriented ontology?

I am reading Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. I'm finding it interesting and a lot of the ideas resonate, although I'm quite sure I don't completely understand it. ...
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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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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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Physical vs abstract collections

In mathematics we deal with 'sets' they are abstract as the objects in them are abstract, they have no tempo-spatial location. How about standard 'collections' we would encounter in real life, if I ...
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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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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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Is there a philosophical assessment of the terms "virtual" and "imaginary"?

In casual terms, at least from explanations I can find, imaginary is something which "does not exist" in reality: "an imaginary world" virtual is something which "exists ...
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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 ...
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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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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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Can we evaluate life, existence and/or consciousness itself according to criteria that exist within it?

The idea of a criteria, of evaluation, of meaning, of assigning characteristics, of judging things as positive or negative or neutral, only exists as a subset of existence as far as I can tell. In ...
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Does existence consist of two categories?

The two categories I wish to describe is: Eternal existence being uncaused and having always been Short term existences such as human consciousness or other types which are destructible from their ...
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Under what conditions can we say that two things are ontological distinct?

I am curious as to under what conditions we say that two things are ontologically distinct. My hunch is that we say two things are ontologically distinct if they differ in their essential properties. ...
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Does super-essentiality preclude compatibility with Anaxagoras?

On the one hand, God as superessential implies: Part of God's divine nature is to be found in humans, and indeed all things This seems to be consonant with the view of the cosmos held by Anaxagoras: ...
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How can universal truths lead to particular truths?

Disclaimer: I have not read philosophy outside of limited Greek works So, Plato theorized that there was a world of "universals" and "particulars", the world of general principles (...
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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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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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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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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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