Ontology :: essays research papers

Ontology&9 single of the most controversial debates in philosophy has been over the nature of creation. In the Pre-Socratic era the dispute concentrate on whether change was constant while our human perceptions made silent separations so that we could make sense of our environment, or if being exists omnipresently and that our perceptions of diversity in study are false. Plato tries to solve this predicament with his theory of an goalive truthfulness in a realm different from that which we experience. Aristotle agrees with Socrates except that he believes an objects true essence cannot exist separated from the object itself. I presume that we can exist with our own identity and inhere to a greater whole simultaneously, however my rationalism does not extend beyond people. Nonetheless, these philosophers wholly had valid conclusions and their theories compliment each other.&9"War is great power"1 said Heraclitus. He believes that reality is not composed of a number o f things, but is a process of continual creation and destruction. An hi-fi metaphor for his rationale is a river. Its location remains essenti eachy the same. One can walk away from it, and return with the confidence that it leave behind still be there. However, the exact water that flows through it is never the same. One cant tell the difference amongst the water in the river now and the water in the river earlier and yet this transience of matter does not detract from the identity of the river. Heraclitus would say that all of what we experience is worry the river, forever changing in a process of erosion and creation.&9Heraclitus successor, Parmenides, believes that Being must exist virtually in the mind. Because nothing cannot be thought without thinking of it as something, there cannot be "nothing"2, all that can exist is Being. If there is only Being it must be indestructible, uncreated, and eternal. If one agrees that Being is , then there cant be any place where being is not. According Parmenides purely logical view, all perception of vacuous space is an illusion.&9Plato tried to solve this dilemma of ontology with his theory of the forms. "You have before your mind these two orders of things, the visible and the intelligible,"3 he says, which can be compared to opinion and knowledge respectively. In The country he uses a line analogy to explain the connection between what we perceive and what really exists. Dividing a line in four unsymmetrical parts gives us the four stages of understanding with a conjure up of being on one side of the line corresponding to a state of understanding on the other side of the line.