Ontology

History

The philosophical area of ontology dates back to Aristotle's Metaphysics recorded in antiquity. Metaphysics is a compilation of 14 books, filed by researchers as metaphysics because these books followed Aristotle's earlier work Physics, a treatise on nature or birth and growth (meta = after; phusis = internal activity that makes something what it is). Interrelated foci in Metaphysics include ontology, theology, and universal science. First, ontology is the study of what certain entities have in common by virtue of being that entity—the study of being and existence. Ontology includes the definition and classification of entities, the nature of their properties, and the nature of change. Second, theology is the study of things that can be known that are nonmaterial, including topics such as the nature of religion and the world, the study of God, existence of the divine, and questions about creation. Third, Aristotle is critical of Plato's view of universal science. Aristotle is interested in the science of being as being and distinguished the first philosophy of ontology as that basic entity before one introduces the particular details of science (including metaphysical sciences such as cosmology and theology as well as physical sciences such as chemistry and physics). He examines being qua being as what is basic and common to all being, the being of being.

Following Aristotle's work, ontology was often conflated with metaphysics. Ancient and medieval philosophers would generally define metaphysics as including ontological issues. In the 17th century, metaphysics became a catch-all category for things that could not be categorized in another way: not ethics, not epistemology, not logic. Around this time the term ontology came to mean the science of being to formally differentiate the subject matter of ontology from metaphysics. The [Page 696]word ontology was generated in the early 1600s to avoid ambiguities associated with the term metaphysics. One of the earliest uses of the term is attributed to Jacob Lorhard, who used the word ontology in Ogdoas Scholastica (Diagraph of Metaphysic or Ontology) in 1606 when investigating the relationship between science (material things) and religion (spiritual things).

The most basic ground of any theory is its ontological premise. What scholars study and how they explain the findings of their research reflects the assumptions they make about human nature. Any attempt to understand (theorize) an aspect of the world makes assumptions about the phenomenon—such as what exists in a particular domain, conditions of that existence, and relationships on which the phenomenon depends. Ontology examines being or existence as well as its basic categories and relationships. Ontology links theory back to the kinds of things that would have to exist for the theory to be true (i.e., characteristics of human).

...