Relational vs. constituent ontologies

Peter van Inwagen

doi:10.1017/CBO9781107111004.012

Chapter 10 - Relational vs. constituent ontologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Peter van Inwagen

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Peter van Inwagen: Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana

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Summary

In a companion piece to this chapter, an essay entitled “What is an Ontological Category?”, I have tried to give an account of the concept of an ontological category, and I have suggested that ontology is the discipline that attempts to answer Quine's “ontological question” – ‘What is there?’ – in terms of a system of ontological categories. And I have suggested that an ontology is any given such attempt at an answer. Very roughly speaking, in that essay I have defended the view that there are natural classes – classes whose boundaries are not simply matters of arbitrary convention – and I have contended that the ontological categories are natural classes that are in a certain sense very “high” or very comprehensive.

In the present chapter, I’m going simply to assume that we have some sort of intuitive grasp of these concepts – “natural class,” “ontological category,” “ontology” (mass term), and “ontology” (count noun).

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Type: Chapter
Information: Existence
Essays in Ontology
, pp. 202 - 220

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107111004.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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References

Novák, Lukáš, Novotný, Daniel D., Sousedík, Prokop, and Svoboda, David, eds., Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag in cooperation with Studia Neoaristotelica, 2012), pp. 11–24CrossRef Google Scholar

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“Categorical Priority and Categorical Collapse,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87.1 (2013): 89–113

“Building the World from Fundamental Constituents,” Philosophical Studies 158 (2012): 221–256

There are useful summaries of the ontology in “Coincidence as Overlap,” Noûs 40 (2006): 623–659

“In Defense of Essentialism,” Metaphysics, ed. Hawthorne, John, Philosophical Perspectives 20 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), pp. 333–372

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The Empirical Stance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), particularly lecture 1, “Against Analytic Metaphysics,” pp. 1–30

“Impotence and Collateral Damage: One Charge in Van Fraassen's Indictment of Analytical Metaphysics,” Philosophical Topics 35 (2007): 67–82

Lowe, E. J., The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science (Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar

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