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The Science of Being: Ontology Transcript
A slogan about what metaphysics is would be: metaphysics is the study of what there is in the world and what it’s like at a very abstract and broad level of generality, and in particular, addressing those questions that are left over after scientific answers to similar questions have been given.
It is the work of one science to examine being qua being, and the attributes which belong to it qua being, and the same science will examine not only substances but also their attributes, both those above named and the concepts ‘prior’ and ‘posterior’, ‘genus’ and ‘species’, ‘whole’ and part’, and the others of this sort.
The science that examines being qua being is ontology. The Greeks knew that any theory of the world had to assume the existence of some kinds of entities. For example, if I want to assert that numbers are the organizing principle of the world, I must first believe that numbers exist. The acceptance of certain fundamental presuppositions is known as ontological commitment.
Allegedly, Thales, one of the early Greek philosophers, said that everything was water. I don’t know if he really could have meant that, but that’s what he was reported to have said. Democrates thought the world was made up of little particular atoms. Lucretius picked up this idea and had this picture of the world as—everything in the world having the motion of atoms in a very regular way, with every once in a while a little swerve in the motions of the atoms. The basic idea behind this was to find the fundamental ontology, the fundamental kinds of things there are, and think of the world, the incredibly complicated world made up of mountains and clouds and sky and animals and people and plants and so on, as in some way constituted by this fundamental stuff or fundamental kinds of things.
Try to come up with an ontological scheme for the world—so a list of the categories of things, so that everything in the world is going to fit under one of these categories and the categories are suitably broad. So you could come up with a kind of silly list of categories like, you know, paperclips and everything else, but I mean, you want a more reasonable list of categories, so you say, oh there’s physical objects, that’s one category of thing. Now, is that all? There are things that aren’t physical objects. Now you’re starting with an ontological question. Does the world also contain numbers? Are numbers entities or are they just ideas? Maybe ideas is another category, or maybe ideas are physical objects, they’re bits of the brain or something like that.
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