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This article discusses ontology in philosophy. For the term in computer science, see ontology (computer science). Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their An ontology in both Computer science and Information science is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between

In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the most fundamental branch of metaphysics. Metaphysics is the branch of Philosophy investigating principles of reality transcending those of any particular science It studies being or existence and its basic categories and relationships, to determine what entities and what types of entities exist. Disambiguation For the Wigwam album see Being (album, for spiritual or religious beingness, see Ego (spirituality In common usage existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses but in Philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning and is often contrasted with In Metaphysics (in particular Ontology) the different kinds or ways of Being are called categories of being or simply categories An entity is something that has a distinct separate Existence, though it need not be a material existence In Mathematics, Logic and Computer science, type theory is any of several Formal systems that can serve as alternatives to Naive set theory Ontology thus has strong implications for conceptions of reality. Reality, in everyday usage means "the state of things as they actually exist"

Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns refer to entities. Biography Early life Birth and family Plato was born in Athens Greece Other philosophers contend that some nouns do not name entities but provide a kind of shorthand way of referring to a collection (of either objects or events). In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity. MIND ( Moving In New Directions) (est 1975 is an alternative education high school in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. A society is a Population of Humans characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive Culture and Institutions Geometry ( Greek γεωμετρία; geo = earth metria = measure is a part of Mathematics concerned with questions of size shape and relative position Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and god, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy. The electron is a fundamental Subatomic particle that was identified and assigned the negative charge in 1897 by J In Physics and other Sciences energy (from the Greek grc ἐνέργεια - Energeia, "activity operation" from grc ἐνεργός A contract is an exchange of promises between two or more parties to do or refrain from doing an act which is enforceable in a court of law Happiness is an Emotion associated with feelings ranging from contentment and satisfaction to Bliss and intense Joy. For other uses see Time (disambiguation Time is a component of a measuring system used to sequence events to compare the durations of The meaning of the word truth extends from Honesty, Good faith, and Sincerity in general to agreement with Fact or Reality Causality (but not causation) denotes a necessary relationship between one event (called cause and another event (called effect) which is the direct consequence God is the principal or sole Deity in Religions and other belief systems that worship one deity.

Contents

Some basic questions

Ontology has one basic question: "What actually exists?" Different philosophers provide different answers to this question. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language

One common approach is to divide the extant entities into groups called "categories". However, these lists of categories are also quite different from one another. It is in this latter sense that ontology is applied to such fields as theology, library science and artificial intelligence. Theology is the study of a god or the gods from a religious perspective Library science is an Interdisciplinary Science incorporating the Humanities, Law and Applied science to study topics related to

Further examples of ontological questions include:

Concepts

Quintessential ontological concepts include:

Early history of ontology

The concept of ontology is generally thought to have originated in early Greece and occupied Plato and Aristotle. In common usage existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses but in Philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning and is often contrasted with In Philosophy, identity (also called sameness) is whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable in terms of possessing a set of qualities or characteristics In Physics, a physical body (sometimes called simply a body or even an object) is a collection of Masses taken to be one In common usage existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses but in Philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning and is often contrasted with The term "concept" is traced back to 1554–60 ( l conceptum - something conceived but what is today termed "the classical theory of concepts" is the theory of Aristotle In Metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common namely characteristics or qualities Greece (Ελλάδα transliterated: Elláda, historically, Ellás,) officially the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία Biography Early life Birth and family Plato was born in Athens Greece Aristotle (Greek Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC was a Greek philosopher a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself is the Latin form ontologia, which appeared in 1606, in the work Ogdoas Scholastica by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and in 1613 in the Lexicon philosophicum by Rudolf Göckel (Goclenius). The first occurrence in English of "ontology" as recorded by the OED appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as ‘an Account of being in the Abstract’. However its appearance in a dictionary indicates it was in use already at that time. It is likely the word was first used in its Latin form by philosophers based on the Latin roots, which themselves are based on the Greek.

Students of Aristotle first used the word 'metaphysica' (literally "after the physical") to refer to the work their teacher described as "the science of being qua being". The word 'qua' means 'in the capacity of'. According to this theory, then, ontology is the science of being in as much as it is being, or the study of beings insofar as they exist. Take anything you can find in the world, and look at it, not as a puppy or a slice of pizza or a folding chair or a president, but just as something that is. More precisely, ontology concerns determining what categories of being are fundamental and asks whether, and in what sense, the items in those categories can be said to "be". In Metaphysics (in particular Ontology) the different kinds or ways of Being are called categories of being or simply categories

Ontological questions have also been raised and debated by thinkers in the ancient civilizations of India and China, in some cases perhaps predating the Greek thinkers who have become associated with the concept.

Subject, relationship, object

"What exists", "What is", "What am I", "What is describing this to me", all exemplify questions about being, and highlight the most basic problems in ontology: finding a subject, a relationship, and an object to talk about. During the Enlightenment the view of René Descartes that "cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") had generally prevailed, although Descartes himself did not believe the question worthy of any deep investigation. The Age of Enlightenment or The Enlightenment is a term used to describe a phase in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century " la Cogito ergo sum " (I think therefore I am sometimes misquoted as la Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum (Latin "I doubt therefore I think therefore I am" However, Descartes was very religious in his philosophy, and indeed argued that "cogito ergo sum" proved the existence of God. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language " la Cogito ergo sum " (I think therefore I am sometimes misquoted as la Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum (Latin "I doubt therefore I think therefore I am" God is the principal or sole Deity in Religions and other belief systems that worship one deity. Later theorists would note the existence of the "Cartesian Other" — asking "who is reading that sentence about thinking and being?" — and generally concluded that it must be God. The Cartesian Other is the counterpart to the Cartesian Self. God is the principal or sole Deity in Religions and other belief systems that worship one deity.

This answer, however, became increasingly unsatisfactory in the 20th century as the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and even particle physics explored some of the most fundamental barriers to knowledge about being. The twentieth century of the Common Era began on The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of Philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions foundations and implications of Mathematics. Philosophy of science is the study of assumptions foundations and implications of Science. Particle physics is a branch of Physics that studies the elementary constituents of Matter and Radiation, and the interactions between them Sociological theorists, most notably George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other," the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self. The Cartesian Other was also used by Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract regulatory force, and Emile Durkheim who viewed this as a psychologically manifested entity which represented God in society at large. Id, ego, and super-ego are the three parts of the " Psychic apparatus " defined in Sigmund Freud 's structural model of

Body and environment

Schools of subjectivism, objectivism and relativism existed at various times in the 20th century, and the postmodernists and body philosophers tried to reframe all these questions in terms of bodies taking some specific action in an environment. Subjectivism is a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law Metaphysics is the branch of Philosophy investigating principles of reality transcending those of any particular science Compare Moral relativism, Aesthetic relativism, Social constructionism, Cultural relativism, and Cognitive relativism. Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement' While " Modern " itself refers to something "related to the present" the movement of modernism Embodiment Philosophers cognitive scientists and artificial intelligence researchers who study embodied cognition and the embodied mind argue Action theory is an area in Philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing intentional (wilful human bodily movements of more or less complex kind This relied to a great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking instinctive action in natural and artificial settings — as studied by biology, ecology, and cognitive science. Foundations of modern biology There are five unifying principles Ecology (from Greek grc οἶκος oikos, "house(hold" and grc -λογία -logia) is the scientific study of Cognitive science may be broadly defined as the multidisciplinary study of mind and behavior

The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of being itself became difficult to really define. Disambiguation For the Wigwam album see Being (album, for spiritual or religious beingness, see Ego (spirituality What did people mean when they said "A is B", "A must be B", "A was B". . . ? Some linguists advocated dropping the verb "to be" from the English language, leaving "E Prime", supposedly less prone to bad abstractions. E-Prime, short for English-Prime, is a modified English Syntax and vocabulary lacking all forms of the verb To be: be is am Others, mostly philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage. Heidegger attempted to distinguish being and existence. Martin Heidegger ( September 26, 1889 &ndash May 26, 1976) (ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪ̯dɛgɐ was an influential German philosopher

Being

Existentialism regards being as a fundamental central concept. Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives and that this essence follows from their existence Disambiguation For the Wigwam album see Being (album, for spiritual or religious beingness, see Ego (spirituality It is anything that can be said to 'be' in various senses of the word 'be'. The verb to be has many different meanings and can therefore be rather ambiguous. For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. Ambiguity (Am-big-u-i-ty is the property of being ambiguous, where a Word, term notation sign Symbol, Phrase, sentence, or any Because "to be" has so many different meanings, there are, accordingly, many different ways of being. In Metaphysics (in particular Ontology) the different kinds or ways of Being are called categories of being or simply categories In Systems-Theory, 'being' corresponds with the 'system-state' and Systems-Engineering(not system-administration. . . ) is the engineering-grade/wise onthology, which identifies to the architects the existence of systems and defines their boundaries to them.

Social science

Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches: realism (the idea that facts are out there just waiting to be discovered), empiricism (the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts), positivism (which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves), and post-modernism (which holds that facts are fluid and elusive, so that we should focus only on our observational claims). In Philosophy, empiricism is a theory of Knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from Experience. Positivism is the Philosophy that the only authentic knowledge is knowledge that is based on actual sense experience Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement' While " Modern " itself refers to something "related to the present" the movement of modernism

Prominent ontologists

See also

External links

Aristotle (Greek Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC was a Greek philosopher a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. Alain Badiou (born January 17, 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent French Marxist Philosopher, formerly chair Gilles Deleuze ( (January 18 1925 &ndash November 4 1995 was a French philosopher of the late 20th century Martin Heidegger ( September 26, 1889 &ndash May 26, 1976) (ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪ̯dɛgɐ was an influential German philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus ( Ancient Greek: &mdash grc-Latn ''Hērákleitos ho Ephésios'' English Heraclitus the Ephesian) (ca Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (ˈhʊsɛrl April 8 1859 – April 26 1938) was a philosopher, known as the father of Roman Witold Ingarden (February 5 1893 – June 14 1970 a Polish philosopher working in the fields of phenomenology, Ontology, and Aesthetics Immanuel Kant (ɪmanuəl kant 22 April 1724 12 February 1804 was an 18th-century German Philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg Parmenides of Elea ( Greek:, early 5th century BC was an Ancient Greek Philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Biography Early life Birth and family Plato was born in Athens Greece Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (maʁsɛl pʁust (10 July 1871 &ndash 18 November 1922 was a French Novelist Essayist and Critic Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25 1908 Akron, Ohio &ndash December 25 2000 (known to intimates as "Van" Gilbert Ryle ( 19 August 1900 - 6 October 1976) was a British Philosopher, and a representative of the generation of Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (21 June 1905 &ndash 15 April 1980 commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (ʒɑ̃ pol saʁtʁə was a French Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza (ברוך שפינוזה Bento de Espinosa Benedictus de Spinoza ( November 24, 1632 – February 21, Alfred North Whitehead, OM ( February 15 1861, Ramsgate, Kent, England &ndash December 30 1947, Charles Margrave Taylor (born November 5, 1931) CC GOQ MA DPhil FRSC is a Philosopher from Cosmology (from Greek grc κοσμολογία - grc κόσμος kosmos, "universe" and grc -λογία -logia) is study Epistemology (from Greek επιστήμη - episteme, "knowledge" + λόγος, " Logos " or theory of knowledge In Information science, an upper ontology ( top-level ontology, or foundation ontology) is an attempt to create an ontology which describes very In Mathematical logic, mereology is a collection of axiomatic First-order theories dealing with parts and their respective wholes This is the concept of metamodeling in Computer science and related disciplines This is the concept of metamodeling in Computer science and related disciplines Metaphysics is the branch of Philosophy investigating principles of reality transcending those of any particular science A modal logic is any system of formal logic that attempts to deal with modalities. Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, nothing is a philosophical position that argues that Existence is without objective meaning Purpose An ontology in both Computer science and Information science is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between Philosophy of science is the study of assumptions foundations and implications of Science. Philosophy of space and time is the branch of Philosophy concerned with the issues surrounding the Ontology, Epistemology, and character of Space The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of Philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions foundations and implications of Mathematics. Quantum ontology is based on the idea that the underlying reality of Quantum mechanics fundamentally alters the nature of mankind's (and by extension any other sentient race's Solipsism ( Latin: solus, alone + ipse, self is the philosophical idea that "My mind is the only thing that I know exists Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification The word comes from the Greek, taxis (meaning 'order' 'arrangement' and, nomos Theology is the study of a god or the gods from a religious perspective Perfection is broadly a state of completeness and flawlessness Clay Shirky (born 1964 is an American writer consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies

Dictionary

ontology

-noun

  1. (uncountable, philosophy) The branch of metaphysics that addresses the nature or essential characteristics of being and of things that exist; the study of being qua being.
  2. (countable, philosophy) The theory of a particular philosopher or school of thought concerning the fundamental types of entity in the universe.
  3. (logic) A logical system involving theory of classes, developed by Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939).
  4. (computer science, information science) A structure of concepts or entities within a domain, organized by relationships; a system model.
  5. (Can we verify(+) this sense?) (computer science, information science) A specification of a conceptualization. Proposed by Tom Gruber (1992).
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