Quotes About Ontology

A determinate emptiness: a lack, a privation, a dimension (new type of intellectual existence).

The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only humans and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made.

Perception teaches us an ontology that it alone can reveal to us.

The thing offers itself as preliminary, primordial, anterior to all perception, like a landscape that is there before us and just as we will see it afterward...But at the same time, I can posit this universe anterior to me only as I perceive it...Bergson thus posits consciously a paradox inherent to perception: Being is anterior to perception, and this primordial Being is conceivable only in relation to perception.

The structure of behavior is neither thing nor consciousness, and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind.

There has to be an ideality which has need of time.

It is impossible, in this world, to separate things from their way of appearing...Form and content – what is said and the way in which it is said – cannot exist separately from one another.

Silent speech through which the thing dengt and the world Weltet .

The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.

Psychoanalysis: either the last conquest of scientific and techinitionist ontology or the rediscovery of another contact with being: being that is neither for itself, nor being object, but the contradictory being of human desire.

Each field is a dimension, and Being is dimensionality itself.

The world is nothing but world-as-meaning

If it is true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of of the world.

The incompleteness of the reduction is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being.

One cannot make a direct ontology. My 'indirect' method (being in the beings) is alone conformed with being--'negative philosophy' like 'negative theology.

The task of philosophy should be to describe this labyrinth, to elaborate a concept of being such that its contradictions, neither accepted nor "transcended," still have their place. What was impossible for modern dialectical philosophies, because the dialectic which they contained remained bound by a predialectical ontology, would become possible in an ontology which reveals in being itself an overlap or movement.

Discussing, learning and teaching, studying and communicating, participating in actions—these are some of the forms of activism that constitute the central axis of the production of subjectivity. A plural ontology of politics is set in action through the encounter and composition of militant subjectivities.

La práctica de la astronomía y la voluntad científica vacían el cielo cristiano como una bañera llena de agua residual. La física es una antimetafísica; permite una ontología material

a self-creating universe is a contradiction in terms.

Rather, it is the ontological shadowland of "nonhuman others" that must be vindicated. In this quasi-theology, to enter the state of domination/damnation we needn't act to evil effect, deliberately or otherwise. Our "knowledge" is sufficient to condemn us. "Modern science" itself is the source of the evil taint. To know is to be guilty of dominating what is known.

But if the instinctual duality is Life and Death, our modification of Freud's ontology entails the hypothesis that Life and Death coexist in some undifferentiated unity at the animal level and that they could be reunified into some higher harmony in man

Is a pea cut in half one wounded thing or two?

For Einstein, as for Gödel, philosophy without ontology was an illusion, and physics without philosophy reduced to engineering.

selfishness brings with it a surprising power of invention, it tends to create its own ontology.