Ontology

In the Western philosophy it refers to the philosophical doctrine that takes being and its essence as its object of inquiry. As a philosophical term, it first appeared in the 17th century, and was used by the German philosopher Goclenius who combined ónta (beings), the plural of on, with lógos (science, reason) to create Ontologie, i.e., the doctrine of being. Another German philosopher Clauberg combined “onta” with the Greek word sophía (“wisdom”, “knowledge”) to create Ontosophie, a synonym for Ontologie, i.e. “knowledge or science of being”. Descartes called the first philosophy that studies substance or noumena “metaphysical ontology”.

Ontology came to be known in the 18th century through the use of the German rationalist C. Wolff. Wolff divided philosophy into two parts: practical philosophy and theoretical philosophy, which was again divided into logic and metaphysics, which included ontology, cosmology, psychology and theology. In this way, Ontologia was regarded as a basic and relatively independent discipline in philosophy. Ontology in Western philosophy takes being and its essence as its object of inquiry. What is “being” and whether one can understand the essence of “being” have become the basic question of its study and discussion. The usage of “ontology” is distinguished into a wider and a narrower sense: Ontology in a wider sense, as opposed to epistemology, refers to the theory on the ultimate nature of all reality, which needs to be known through epistemology, thus the study of the ultimate nature of all reality is ontology, while the study of how to know the “ultimate nature of all reality” is epistemology. Ontology in a narrower sense, as opposed to cosmology, is the study of the nature of the universe, while the study of the origin and structure of the universe belongs to cosmology.

Marxism holds that the basic question of philosophy is the question concerning the relation of thinking and being, matter and consciousness, that the objective material world is independent of human consciousness, and that man can know the world, change the world and know the relation between man and the world through practice. Upholding the unity of dialectics, epistemology and logic and upholding the method of unifying materialist and dialectical research, practical research, epistemological research and the research of the conception of history, it has given up the philosophical method of studying “being” apart from man’s social practice, thus fundamentally denied the so-called ontological question as well as the ontological philosophy.