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Parmenides was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of reality.

Ontology (from onto-, from the Greek ὤν, ὄντος "being; that which is", present participle of the verb εἰμί "be", and -λογία, -logia: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.^{[citation needed]}

Overview[link]

Ontology, in analytic philosophy, concerns the determination whether some categories of being are fundamental and asks in what sense the items in those categories can be said to "be." It is the inquiry into being in so much as it is being, or into beings insofar as they exist—and not insofar as, for instance, particular facts can be obtained about them or particular properties belong to them.^{[citation needed]}

Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns (including abstract nouns) refer to existent entities. Other philosophers contend that nouns do not always name entities, but that some provide a kind of shorthand for reference 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.^[1] Between these poles of realism and nominalism, there are also a variety of other positions; but 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, space, time, truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.^{[citation needed]}

Some fundamental questions[link]

Principal questions of ontology are "What can be said to exist?", "Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things?", "What are the meanings of being?", "What are the various modes of being of entities?". Various philosophers^[who?] have provided different answers to these questions.^{[citation needed]}

One common approach is to divide the extant subjects and predicates into groups called categories. Of course, such lists of categories differ widely from one another, and it is through the co-ordination of different categorical schemes that ontology relates to such fields as library science and artificial intelligence. Such an understanding of ontological categories, however, is merely taxonomic, classificatory. The categories are, properly speaking,^[2] the ways in which a being can be addressed simply as a being, such as what it is (its 'whatness', quidditas or essence), how it is (its 'howness' or qualitativeness), how much it is (quantitativeness), where it is, its relatedness to other beings, etc.^{[citation needed]}

Further examples of ontological questions include:^{[citation needed]}

• What is existence, i.e. what does it mean for a being to be?
• Is existence a property?
• Is existence a genus or general class that is simply divided up by specific differences?
• Which entities, if any, are fundamental? Are all entities objects?
• How do the properties of an object relate to the object itself?
• What features are the essential, as opposed to merely accidental attributes of a given object?
• How many levels of existence or ontological levels are there? And what constitutes a 'level'?
• What is a physical object?
• Can one give an account of what it means to say that a physical object exists?
• Can one give an account of what it means to say that a non-physical entity exists?
• What constitutes the identity of an object?
• When does an object go out of existence, as opposed to merely changing?
• Do beings exist other than in the modes of objectivity and subjectivity, i.e. is the subject/object split of modern philosophy inevitable?

Concepts[link]

Essential ontological dichotomies include:

• Universals and particulars
• Substance and accident
• Abstract and concrete objects
• Essence and existence
• Determinism and indeterminism

History of ontology[link]

Etymology[link]

While the etymology is Greek, the oldest extant record of the word itself is the New 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); see classical compounds for this type of word formation.^{[citation needed]}

The first occurrence in English of "ontology" as recorded by the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989) appears in Nathaniel Bailey's dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as ‘an Account of being in the Abstract’ - though, of course, such an entry indicates the term was already in use at the 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.^{[citation needed]}

The current on-line edition of the OED (Draft Revision September 2008) gives as first occurrence in English a work by Gideon Harvey (1636/7-1702): Archelogia philosophica nova; or, New principles of Philosophy. Containing Philosophy in general, Metaphysicks or Ontology, Dynamilogy or a Discourse of Power, Religio Philosophi or Natural Theology, Physicks or Natural philosophy - London, Thomson, 1663.^{[citation needed]}

Origins[link]

Parmenides and monism[link]

Parmenides was among the first to propose an ontological characterization of the fundamental nature of existence. In his prologue or proem he describes two views of existence; initially that nothing comes from nothing, and therefore existence is eternal. Consequently our opinions about truth must often be false and deceitful. Most of western philosophy, and science - including the fundamental concepts of falsifiability and the conservation of energy - have emerged from this view. This posits that existence is what can be conceived of by thought, created, or possessed. Hence, there can be neither void nor vacuum; and true reality can neither come into being nor vanish from existence. Rather, the entirety of creation is eternal, uniform, and immutable, though not infinite (he characterized its shape as that of a perfect sphere). Parmenides thus posits that change, as perceived in everyday experience, is illusory. Everything that can be apprehended is but one part of a single entity. This idea somewhat anticipates the modern concept of an ultimate grand unification theory that finally explains all of existence in terms of one inter-related sub-atomic reality which applies to everything.^{[citation needed]}

Ontological pluralism[link]

The opposite of eleatic monism is the pluralistic conception of Being. In the 5th century BC, Anaxagoras and Leucippus replaced ^[3] the reality of Being (unique and unchanging) with that of Becoming and therefore by a more fundamental and elementary ontic plurality. This thesis originated in the Greek-ion world, stated in two different ways by Anaxagoras and by Leucippus. The first theory dealt with "seeds" (which Aristotle referred to as "homeomeries") of the various substances. The second was the atomistic theory,^[4] which dealt with reality as based on the vacuum, the atoms and their intrinsic movement in it.^{[citation needed]}

The materialist Atomism proposed by Leucippus was indeterminist, but then developed by Democritus in a deterministic way. It was later (4th century BC) that the original atomism was taken again as indeterministic by Epicurus. He confirmed the reality as composed of an infinity of indivisible, unchangeable corpuscles or atoms (atomon, lit. ‘uncuttable’), but he gives weight to characterize atoms while for Leucippus they are characterized by a "figure", an "order" and a "position" in the cosmos.^[5] They are, besides, creating the whole with the intrinsic movement in the vacuum, producing the diverse flux of being. Their movement is influenced by the Parenklisis (Lucretius names it Clinamen) and that is determined by the chance. These ideas foreshadowed our understanding of traditional physics until the nature of atoms was discovered in the 20th century.^{[citation needed]}

Plato[link]

Plato developed this distinction between true reality and illusion, in arguing that what is real are eternal and unchanging Forms or Ideas (a precursor to universals), of which things experienced in sensation are at best merely copies, and real only in so far as they copy (‘partake of’) such Forms. In general, Plato presumes that all nouns (e.g., ‘Beauty’) refer to real entities, whether sensible bodies or insensible Forms. Hence, in The Sophist Plato argues that Being is a Form in which all existent things participate and which they have in common (though it is unclear whether ‘Being’ is intended in the sense of existence, copula, or identity); and argues, against Parmenides, that Forms must exist not only of Being, but also of Negation and of non-Being (or Difference). Universals do not have an existence over and above the particular things which instantiate them.^{[clarification needed]}

In his Categories, Aristotle identifies ten possible kinds of thing that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. For Aristotle there are four different ontological dimensions:^{[citation needed]}

i) according to the various categories or ways of addressing a being as such

ii) according to its truth or falsity (e.g. fake gold, counterfeit money)

iii) whether it exists in and of itself or simply 'comes along' by accident

iv) according to its potency, movement (energy) or finished presence (Metaphysics Book Theta).

According to Avicenna, and in an interpretation of Greek Aristotelian and Platonist ontological doctrines in mediaeval metaphysics, being is either necessary, contingent qua possible, or impossible. Necessary being is that which cannot but be, since its non-being entails a contradiction. Contingent qua possible being is neither necessary nor impossible for it to be or not to be. It is ontologically neutral, and is brought from potential existing into actual existence by way of a cause that is external to its essence. Its being is borrowed unlike the necessary existent, which is self-subsisting and is impossible for it not to be. As for the impossible, it necessarily does not exist, and the affirmation of its being is a contradiction.^[6]

Other ontological topics[link]

Ontological and epistemological certainty[link]

René Descartes, with "je pense donc je suis" or "cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am", argued that "the self" is something that we can know exists with epistemological certainty. Descartes argued further that this knowledge could lead to a proof of the certainty of the existence of God, using the ontological argument that had been formulated first by Anselm of Canterbury.^{[citation needed]}

Certainty about the existence of "the self" and "the other", however, came under increasing criticism in the 20th century. 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. According to Mead, "we do not assume there is a self to begin with. Self is not presupposed as a stuff out of which the world arises. Rather the self arises in the world" ^[7][8] The Cartesian Other was also used by Sigmund Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract regulatory force, and Émile Durkheim who viewed this as a psychologically manifested entity which represented God in society at large.^{[citation needed]}

Body and environment, questioning the meaning of being[link]

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. 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^[9], and cognitive science.^{[citation needed]}

The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of being itself became difficult to really define. 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. Others, mostly philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage. Heidegger distinguished human being as existence from the being of things in the world. Heidegger proposes that our way of being human and the way the world is for us are cast historically through a fundamental ontological questioning. These fundamental ontological categories provide the basis for communication in an age: a horizon of unspoken and seemingly unquestionable background meanings, such as human beings understood unquestioningly as subjects and other entities understood unquestioningly as objects. Because these basic ontological meanings both generate and are regenerated in everyday interactions, the locus of our way of being in a historical epoch is the communicative event of language in use.^[7] For Heidegger, however, communication in the first place is not among human beings, but language itself shapes up in response to questioning (the inexhaustible meaning of) being.^[10] Even the focus of traditional ontology on the 'whatness' or 'quidditas' of beings in their substantial, standing presence can be shifted to pose the question of the 'whoness' of human being itself.^[11]

Prominent ontologists[link]

See also[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Look up ontology in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ontology

• Ontology. Its Theory and History from a Philosophical Perspective
• Logic and Ontology entry by Thomas Hofwebwer in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Free Open access book: Paolo Valore (ed), Topics on General and Formal Ontology.
• International Ontology Congress

Michał Heller

Michał Kazimierz Heller, (March 12, 1936 in Tarnów) is a professor of philosophy at The Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow, Poland, and an adjunct member of the Vatican Observatory staff. He also serves as a lecturer in the philosophy of science and logic at the Theological Institute in Tarnów. A Roman Catholic priest belonging to the diocese of Tarnów, Dr. Heller was ordained in 1959.

Career[link]

Michał Heller attended high school in Mościce, graduated from the Catholic University of Lublin, where he earned a master's degree in philosophy in 1965 and a Ph.D. in cosmology in 1966.

After beginning his teaching career at Tarnów, he joined the faculty of the Pontifical Academy of Theology in 1972 and was appointed to a full professorship in 1985. The recipient of an honorary degree from the Cracow University of Technology, he has been a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and a visiting scientist at Belgium’s University of Liège, the University of Oxford, the University of Leicester, Ruhr University in Germany, The Catholic University of America, and the University of Arizona among others. Dr. Heller is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

His current research is concerned with the singularity problem in general relativity and the use of noncommutative geometry in seeking the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. He has published nearly 200 scientific papers not only in general relativity and relativistic cosmology, but also in philosophy and the history of science and science and theology and is the author of more than 20 books. In his volume, Is Physics an Art? (Biblos, 1998), he writes about mathematics as the language of science and also explores such humanistic issues as beauty as a criterion of truth, creativity, and transcendence.

In March 2008, Heller was awarded the $1.6 million USD (£820,000) Templeton Prize for his extensive philosophical and scientific probing of "big questions." His works have sought to reconcile the "known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God."^[1]

Heller plans on spending the prize money on the establishment of a research institute named after Nicholas Copernicus aimed at reconciling science and theology.

Commenting on this award of the Templeton Prize, Heller said:

"If we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about the cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the great blueprint of God’s thinking about the universe; the question on ultimate causality: why is there something rather than nothing? When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes. Science is but a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God from question marks out of which we and the world around us seem to be made."^[2]

Further reading[link]

• The Origins of Time, in: The Study of Time IV, ed. by J.T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, D. Park, Springer Verlag, New York-Heidelberg-Berlin 1981, pp. 90–93.
• D.J. Raine, M. Heller, The Science of Space-Time, Pachart Publishing House, Tucson 1981.
• Encountering the Universe, Pachart Publishing House, Tucson 1982.
• Questions to the Universe - Ten Lectures on the Foundations of Physics and Cosmology, Pachart Publishing House, Tucson 1986.
• The World and the Word - Between Science and Religion, Pachart Publishing House, Tucson 1986.
• Theoretical Foundations of Cosmology - Introduction to the Global Structure of Space-Time, World Scientific, Singapore-London 1992.
• The New Physics and a New Theology, in: G.V. Coyne, S. Giovannini, T.M. Sierotowicz, Vatican Obserwatory Publications, 1996.
• Lemaître, Big Bang and the Quantum Universe, Pachart, Tucson, 1996.
• Creative Tension, Templeton Foundation Press, Philadelphia - London, 2003, ISBN 1-932031-34-0
• Algebraic Self-Duality as the "Ultimate Explanation", Foundations of Science, 9, 2004, 369-385.
• Some Mathematical Physics for Philosophers, Pontifical Council for Culture, Pontifical Gregorian University, Vatican City-Rome, 2005.

See also[link]

• List of Christian thinkers in science
• List of Roman Catholic scientist-clerics

References[link]

External links[link]

• Michał Heller's homepage
• Templeton Prize website
• New Scientist interview
• THE FAR-FUTURE UNIVERSE"Eschatology From A Cosmic Perspective" : Heller was a participant in this conference held November 7–9, 2000 in Rome, Italy
• An article by Stanislaw Wszołek about Heller's life and philosophy
• Polish Scientist and Priest Wins Templeton Prize
• Message to Monsignor Michał Heller, winner of the Templeton Prize