IV. Ontology: Idealism (Plato, Berkeley); Representative Realism (Locke); Materialism (Marx)

Ontology
a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of existenc

Introduction
This new perspective on the overall direction of our growing universe provides a new context for understanding the specific nature of our existence - the Science of Being. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that investigates the nature of being and of the first principles, or categories such as Cosmology. Cosmology concerns itself with the origins and general structure of the universe, its parts, elements, and laws, especially with regard to such characteristics as space, time, causality, and synchronicity. the fact of two or more things happening at exactly the same time
Ontology is sometimes considered to be synonymous with metaphysics, but is that part of metaphysics that specifies the most fundamental categories of existence, the elementary substances or structures out of which the world is made. Ontology will thus analyse the most general and abstract concepts or distinctions that underlie every more specific description of any phenomenon in the world, e.g. time, space, matter, process, cause and effect, system.

Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns refer to entities. Other philosophers contend that some nouns do not name entities but provide a kind of shorthand way of referring to a collection (of either objects or events). In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.

the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations
Ontology can be said to study conceptions of reality


Fundamental Questions of Ontology
"What can be said to exist?"
"What is a thing?"
"Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things?"
"What are the meanings of being?"
"What are the various modes of being of entities?"

Concepts
Essential ontological dichotomies(diff of 2 thing) include:
universals and particulars
substance and accident
abstract and concrete objects
essence and existence
determinism and indeterminism
monism and dualism
idealism and materialism

Origin
Parmenides and monism
Body and environment, questioning the meaning of being
Ontology and language (what is?)
Ontology and human geography (subjective & objective)
Reality and actuality (diff)
Microcosmic ontology (atom example, can’t know the true reality of such tiny objects)

Subject, Relationship, Object
"What exists", "What is", "What am I", "What is describing this to me", all exemplify questions about being, and highlight the most basic problems in ontology: finding a subject, a relationship, and an object to talk about.
During the Enlightenment the view of Rene Descartes that "cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") had generally prevailed, although Descartes himself did not believe the question worthy of any deep investigation. However, Descartes was very religious in his philosophy, and indeed argued that "cogito ergo sum" proved the existence of God. Later theorists would note the existence of the "Cartesian Other" - asking "who is reading that sentence about thinking and being?" - and generally concluded that it must be God.
This answer, however, became increasingly unsatisfactory in the 20th century as the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science and even particle physics explored some of the most fundamental barriers to knowledge about being. Sociological theorists, most notably George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman, saw the Cartesian Other as a "Generalized Other," the imaginary audience that individuals use when thinking about the self. The Cartesian Other was also used by Freud, who saw the superego as an abstract


Body and Environment
Schools of subjectivism, objectivism and relativism existed at various times in the 20th century, and the postmodernists and body philosophers tried to reframe all these questions in terms of bodies taking some specific action in an environment. This relied to a great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking instinctive action in natural and artificial settings - as studied by biology, ecology, and cognitive science.
The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of being itself became difficult to really define. What did people mean when they said "A is B", "A must be B", "A was B"...? Some linguists advocated dropping the verb "to be" from the English language, leaving "E Prime", supposedly less prone to bad abstractions. Others, mostly philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage. Heidegger attempted to distinguish being and existence.

Becoming
The first formal development of this notion within philosophy began with the pre-Socratic Heraclitus, where he posited agon ("strife of opposites") as the ontological basis of all reality in terms of this endless transformative conflict, which was later contrasted and dominated by the Parmenidean, or Platonic, notion of Being, until more recent philosophers began a reversion of this trend.
Notably and the first to make such an advocation since Heraclitus was the nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who used the expression "the innocence of becoming", a fundamental element of his philosophical thought grounded in the "will to power as pathos", as a means to describe the aesthetic qualities of existence, which pervades his thinking, including but not limited to ideas such as his "Dionysian world", "eternal recurrence", "amor fati", and "decadence". It was with this a-teleological view that he attempted to disgregate all views pertaining to the human condition, where "thingness" is ultimately characterized as a mere "hypothesis" in Nietzsche's phrase, and such a view, pertaining to the "inequality" of all "things", carries deep implications for ethics and the nature of knowledge.

Social Science
Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches: realism (the idea that facts are out there just waiting to be discovered), empiricism (the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts), positivism (which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves), and postmodernism (which holds that facts are fluid and elusive difficult to find, define or achieve, so that we should focus only on our observational claims).