Ontology is the home within all philosophies of science, the main branch of that is metaphysics. In this modern period, all philosophers agree to the importance of Ontology. It is not just an idea; it is the basis on which all theories of science are built and examined. When a scientist tries to come up with explanations for a particular phenomenon, they try to relate it back to ontology or the metaphysical foundation.
Philosophers have been debating ontology ever since the time of Aristotle in the third century BCE. He argued that everything exists in pairs or collections, as in his definition of substance. A particular thing cannot be both a substance and non-substance, nor can one exist in combination with another and not exist in combination with another. These definitions are important to our everyday lives and to the methods we use to distinguish between what exists and what does not. In this article we will consider some of the most famous philosophers who made significant contributions to our knowledge about ontology.
The Sophists (posium) and the Neo-Platonists (dialectic) were amongst the first to introduce concepts such as plurality, parts, comparison, and geometrical objects. From these concepts, further developments took place which became the foundations for modern philosophy. Aristotle argued for a duality of nature, saying that nature consists of plurality, a unity, and a perfect order. Metaphysicians, on the other hand, disagreed with Aristotle’s belief that nature consists of a perfect unity and a plurality. They believed that there is an inner nature that must be shown to be a physical reality, thus accounting for the difference between what exist in reality and what is idealized in our minds. Descartes, on the other hand, rejected the ideas of a single nature and multiplicity of natural beings.
A major theme of all philosophers’ systems is identity. Identity is the relation between things that are distinct from each other and which are similar to one another. It is therefore the fundamental idea of metaphysics. Metaphysicians attempt to give precise descriptions of this concept by means of abstract and eliminative reasoning. An example of this process is used when someone says that objects are number one, parts number two, and their combination number three.
The debate concerning ontology continues to this day. On one side are those who defend the existence of essential categories, such as substance, place, and person. According to them these categories are real, independent entities, the basic structure of the universe, and they are the only entities that can be fully known. They maintain that there is nothing in the external world that can be properly described using a set of definite and simple rules. Others, including some classicists, believe that the concepts of substance, place, and person are mere categories that have no bearing on reality, and that language is used to make necessary claims about objects that cannot be taken literally.
According to the philosophy of logical naturalism, however, everything that can be actually thought of exists as part of the actual world. The actual world consists of things that have definite qualities and definitions, and the concepts of the concepts that these things have do not have anything to do with reality. For example, it is the belief of most philosophers that there are animals that do not exist at all. When we say that animals exist, we are talking about concepts, but these concepts are independent of things in the external world. In this way, philosophers believe that physical reality does not contain necessary connections to the existence of things that cannot be actually thought of, such as the concepts of soul and mind.
Some philosophers, however, believe that the concepts of substance and place are independent entities that can be used to describe physical objects. However, the use of these concepts requires certain predications, such as the idea that an object can exist only in space and time and that it will never change from such a position. Thus, according to this school of thought, all the predicated attributes of objects must be related to their location in space-time. Thus, the philosophers argue that we cannot talk about the properties of objects without making reference to the notions of place and time.
Another major branch of philosophy is nominalism, which believes that the world is made up of nothing but nominal things. Many of the modern day philosophers subscribe to this school of thought. The proponents of nominalism include Descartes, Leibniz and some others. However, the philosophy of
Ontology has its roots in the ideas of the philosophers Parmenides and Plato.