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ontology
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Category: History & Society
Key People:
Martin Heidegger
John Searle
George Santayana
Emmanuel Lévinas
Xiong Shili
Related Topics:
Occam’s razor
individuation
essentialism
ontological argument
Being
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ontology, the philosophical study of being in general, or of what applies neutrally to everything that is real. It was called “first philosophy” by Aristotle in Book IV of his Metaphysics. The Latin term ontologia (“science of being”) was felicitously invented by the German philosopher Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus) and first appeared in his work Ogdoas Scholastica (1st ed.) in 1606. It entered general circulation after being popularized by the German rationalist philosopher Christian Wolff in his Latin writings, especially Philosophia Prima sive Ontologia (1730; “First Philosophy or Ontology”). Wolff contrasted ontology, or general metaphysics, which applied to all things, with ...(100 of 1167 words)

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