Blackwell Reference Online

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Two senses of the term can be distinguished: either (a) the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence or being as such, apart from any particular existent objects (philosophical ontology); or (b) the entities posited or presupposed by some particular substantive scientific theory (scientific ontology). Sense (2) is relatively unproblematic and may be generalized to extrascientific contexts. Traditional philosophical ontology reflected on the nature and relations between different kinds of existents – the sense in which, for example, numbers, minds and qualities could be said to exist. Immanuel Kant and David Hume criticized such enquiries as necessarily undecidable, or even meaningless, attempts to transgress the bounds of possible experience, and proposed a rejection of ontology not just in the styles practised by Leibniz or John Locke, but generally. In the mainstream of analytical philosophy the prohibition on ontology was generally upheld in the twentieth century. But working from within this tradition, Roy Bhaskar has recently argued that philosophical ontology need not be dogmatic and transcendent, but may be conditional and immanent, taking as its subject matter not a world apart from that investigated by science (a Platonic or Lockean-Leibnizian noumenal realm), but just that world from the standpoint of what can be established about it by conditional a ... log in or subscribe to read full text