From the very beginning, it must be noted that people who are not professional philosophers and are far from this science may not understand at all what ontology studies and what kind of science it is. The language is so complicated and confused in it. But in philosophical sciences, which include such a discipline as ontology, it is not uncommon. In addition, each philosopher persistently insists on his understanding of the system, his conclusions, often ignoring the rest. We add that the philosophers themselves argue whether there is any benefit from ontology at all. What is usually understood by ontology? The science of being, of being, of the eternal, of the abstract and most general principles of being, absolute, unchanging, etc. What does ontology study? If ontos is translated from Greek as being, then is ontology a science of being? It seems that everything is simple. But is it possible to determine the subject of science from its name?
In textbooks on philosophy, ontology is a branch of philosophy that examines the universal, independent of man principles and principles of being. What does that mean? What is being? What general principles and principles can it have? How can they not depend on a person? And what does it mean to exist or to be? It seems that the whole point is that without a detailed study of the subject of ontology, that is, without answering the question “What does ontology study?”, Without exploring the principles that distinguish it from other areas of knowledge, any definition of ontology it will be nothing more than a collection of meaningless words, no more than expressing the personal opinion of its author. But in this short article we do not pose such a task. Therefore, we restrict ourselves to more or less official points of view.
Ontology is a branch of philosophy that studies being. In the classical sense, ontology is knowledge of the extremely general. One of the main questions of ontology is: what exists? The main concepts in this science are being, movement, time, space, the form of being (existential, ideal, material), properties, structure. Thus , ontology tries to describe in the most general form the universe of the existing, not limited by the data of specific sciences and, possibly, not reducible to them. The questions posed by the ontology are a very ancient topic of philosophy, which goes back to Parmenides and other dos to the outskirts. An important contribution to the development of ontology issues was made by Aristotle and Plato.
In the philosophy of the Middle Ages , the ontological problem was central, whether abstract objects (universals) exist. In the philosophy of the 20th century , the following philosophers were specially engaged in ontological problems: Nikolai Hartman, Martin Heidegger, etc. In modern philosophy, the problems of consciousness ontology are of particular interest. What does ontology study? the subject of this science is being, defined as the unity and completeness of all types of reality: objective, virtual, social, subjective, physical. Reality, we are traditional we associate it with matter (the material world) and spirit (the spiritual world, including the concepts of souls, God) and subdivide (materialists) into living, inert and social matter (which entails formalism and a look at the person as an impersonal person in general). To being refers to what can be thought. Its opposite is unthinkable nothing, and also (in the philosophy of Aristotelianism) a still-non-being possibility. In the past century, in existentialism and phenomenology, being was identified with man as the only being with the ability to think and ask a question about being.
However, classical metaphysics understood God as being. People, as being, have will and freedom. Social ontology is the doctrine of the being of society. In the modern interpretation - the doctrine of the existence of society, which includes the doctrine of man, of individuals, interdependent in their self-expression.