Ontology

Nathan Widder

Ontology is a traditional branch of philosophy concerned with the “science of being” and thus with the basic categories of existence or reality and their relations to one another. The term onto-logia has its origins in scholastic writings of the seventeenth century, but the ideas and questions associated with ontology have their origins in various strands of ancient philosophy, including Aristotle's definition of metaphysics as the science of being qua being; the statement in Plato's Sophist , which opens Martin Heidegger's Being and Time , that the meaning of being remains perplexing; and the claims of the pre-Socratic Parmenides of Elea that only the one being “is” and that nothingness does not exist. In analytic philosophy, ontology has come to designate the study of the entities whose existence must be presupposed when affirming a scientific theory. Nevertheless, ontology is still often associated—and in some cases identified—with metaphysics and therefore with ...

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