Ontology
as suggested by Benois Charland, hirsute actor from London and Christopher Bailey, originally from Canada, now of Debden, Essex, and actor and bowling lanes worker with a Starbucks fetish.
Ontology is the domain of what is. An objective reality. Of Epistemology (that's what the chain of events are that lead up to us knowing something). Anything that employs the verb, "to be." It's the study of being and trying to find a catagory to grouup things in.
For example, I can be considered a human, an animal, a caucasian , an actor, a man and an idiot all simultaneously and separately. Am I one? Several? All? None of these things? That's ontology.
Ontology asks us whether the catagroies we put things in are universal. Can a person be good? In what way are apples and oranges different and the same? Is fake money real?
Plato would say that if you give it a name it exists, others would say that when you name something, say a table, its your mind remembering the idea of a table and all the things that make it, well, table-y. As an example, you may not have a "society" because what IS a society, exactly? Can you hold it in your hand, or paint a picture of it? No, but it does describe a bunch of people with similar characteristics. This is what we're concerned with in ontology.
People that ascribe to these thoughts are called nomilalists. They'd might say things like, "You don't have universalisms like strength or humanity, they don't exist. Not properly, like." They'd say they are things you can think about, oh yes, you can think about them, but not have them. Not really hold them tight.
So, if ontology is looking at how we group things - how DO we group things?
Bundle
Well, there's the elegantly named bundle theory, where you, yknow, bundle things together. Like a
philosophical fruit salad.
Dialectics
Or there's peer-to-peer comparisons, or if you will, dialectics. Which is basically down to how you argue things out. A dialectic is an argument between two people who want the same thing. That's a different thing to a debate.
A Debate
Which is where you want to tell someone their wrong. Again and again. Year after grinding year. Dialectics vs debates, like a first date vs marriage.
Value
Then there's value theory. In this we go, "That power station will give electric power to the masses." But then someone else goes, "Yes, but it'll also turn the children into snake-skinned, bug-eyed Susan-Boyle-a-likes, but with the legs of a raptor and with the ability to see round corners." Through this informed discussion, we work out how valuable something is.
Finally, Metaphorical consideration
"I won an argument." What's an argument? "Something that you win or lose." Oh.
OK
But all of these are just methods we use to work out what a thing is worth, what a thing means, or even what a thing is. It's what-ness, it's thing-ness. It's quidditas.
Let's look at where ontology comes from and what it contains.
Monism
Which says that everyone and everything is part of everyone and everything. The universe is one whole thing and we're just cogs inside it. We don't have a beginning or end as we're just a continuation of the eternal.
Ontological pluralism
The opposite of Monism. There are loads of things and we're different people from one day, or one second, to the next.
We've said how Plato talked of all nouns existing because they are nouns, but then Aristotle went on to say that we should look at the ways in which everything is connected property of everything that's even existed.
Conclusion
And that's your primer on ontology - the method of grouping things and understanding what exists and how exists and if anything doesn't exist. Now you may think I've got some of this wrong, but as they say - just because it's wrong doesn't mean it's not true. If you fancy providing any examples or counterexamples to say I'm wrong I would like to assure you that your counterexamples depend on construing my thesis in a way I had not intended. I intended my thesis to be no counterexamples and to always be right.
Welcome to ontology.
PS How many existentialists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two. One to change it and the other to notice how the lightbulb represents a beacon of subjectivity illuminating the Cosmic Netherworld.
