Quotes About Ontology

but to say that there is in every being a mixture of act and potency comes back to the same thing in the end, for act is that in him by which he participates in essence, and potency is that in him by which he participates in substance

The idea of mathematics having an ontology is the very last idea science would ever accept since its acceptance would instantly falsify science and require its replacement by ontological mathematics. Doesn't it alarm you that science deliberately seeks to reject the very thing – mathematics – on which it is 100% reliant?

There are properties, one wants to say, that have never been entertained by any human being; and it also seems wrong to think that properties do not exist before human beings conceive them.

That's what I mean by Guerrilla Ontology; it's getting people to think, giving them puzzles that force them to think.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

Stone is a primal matter, inhuman in its duration. Yet despite its incalculable temporality, the lithic is not some vast and alien outside. A limit-breaching intimacy persistently unfolds. Hurl a rock and you'll shatter an ontology, leave taxonomy in glistening shards.

His philosophy insists that ethics comes first, that "ethics precedes ontology": the first thing we know is our own being, and the way that we know everything else is through the other person.

We believe in Quine, the father of metaontology, and in his criterion of ontological commitment. Which for us ontologists and for our craft was perfectly born in On What There Is . We believe in one catholic and first-order logic. We acknowledge one method—paraphrase—for the remission of ontological sins. And when paraphrase fails, we accept without shame the entities required by our best theories. Amen.

I teach at Harvard that the world and the heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.

It is easier to believe that there was nothing before there was something than that there was something before there was nothing.

It is not possible for form to do without matter because it is not separable, nor can matter itself be purged of form.

Hence our decline of insight as we shift our gaze from human to ant to quark. Our decline of insight should not be mistaken for an insight into decline—a progressive poverty inherent in objective reality. The decline is in our interface, in our perceptions. But we externalize it; we pin it on reality. Then we erect, from this erroneous reification, an ontology of physicalism.

Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.

Ontological priority is normatively neutral, Plato to the contrary notwithstanding.

Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).

The first thing to say about that which is is simply: it is. As Parmenides in ancient Greece formulated the principle: what is, is. Or, in Ayn Rand's words: existence exists.

The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics.

With Beijing Memory No. 5, what is uncanny is that the "machine" refuses to come to life, and in its lifelessness, imagines what life might have been. And it is in this very paradox of "might have been" that we experience the prospective and prosthetic quality of our ontology.

What happens when we accept that style, mediated through yet detached from a racial referent, may not be simply the excess or the opposite of ontology but may in fact be a precondition for embodiment, an insight that challenges the very foundation of the category of the human? What is at stake here is not just the objectification of people but also how that objectification opens up a constitutive estrangement within the articulation of proper personhood.

That whose existence is necessary must necessarily be one essence.

I want to know why the universe exists, why there is something greater than nothing.

Philosophers, especially metaphysicians, explore features of reality and of our mental life that are different from those explored by scientists.

Roughly speaking: objects are colourless

Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.