Quotes About Ontology

And here I want to interject and say that Heidegger is an absolute occasionalist and has no theory of time despite "time" being included in the title Being and Time

there is no reason to believe that a definition necessarily determines the ontological status of the term defined.)

not that I was too out of breath, but that I was, as it were, too alive, living too many lives at once, as if I were breathing for many men. In retrospect, this realization seems far from cogent, simply another layer of ontological mystification, but at the time it seemed akin to revelation.

Much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as 'common sense.'

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

What things may be in themselves we do not know, nor need we care to know, because, after all, a thing can never come before me otherwise than as an appearance.

Thus, if materialism is inadequate to explain my existence, then spiritualism is equally insufficient for this purpose.

In the world of information science, the tricky question of where to put things is known as the "ontology problem.

Why is there an "is"? Why is there something rather than nothing? For that answer both science and religion must turn to the metaphysical.

And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it's more than a chat about race. It's ontological. It's like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it's even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don't exist.

I am not proposing any return to reality—to foundations, to the solidity of an ontology that has its feet on the ground—against the risks of rampant irrationalism, as it seems to me is happening today in certain returns to phenomenology, now combined with the attention of the cognitive sciences

On Religion and Science: You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence of matter–You know I granted the reality of matter only in order to make myself intelligible to your understanding. Be positive scientists, if you please; but ontology has no place in positive science, so leave it alone....

presence and self-presence (89).

Metaphysics is a closed system;

When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.

The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

You can see likewise that the contradiction involved in the concept of 'salvaging' is not a simple intellectual contradiction, but a dialectical one. That is to say, it is only possible to rescue ontology in the shape of this dialectical contradiction, in this pattern in which existence and existent things are mutually interrelated and interdependent - as opposed to an abstract conception of ontology as pure existence standing in absolute opposition to existing beings.

Hence, according to the Philosopher (Metaph. x), "things which are diverse are absolutely distinct, but things which are different differ by something.

To see this we must learn that some have said that relation is not a reality, but only an idea. But this is plainly seen to be false from the very fact that things themselves have a mutual natural order and habitude.

One of the broadest claims of this book is that there will be no further progress in philosophy or the arts without an explicit embrace of the autonomous thing-in-itself.

To treat an object primarily as part of a network is to assume it can be reduced to that set of qualities and relations that it manifests in this particular network.