The Division of Metaphysics and Birth of Ontology in the Beginning of the Modern Age

Later, in the beginning of the modern age, when metaphysics was thought to extend beyond the limits of this definition of it as being qua being, ontology was defined as the most fundamental part of metaphysics, while the study of immaterial substances was delegated to the less fundamental science of natural theology or (if all immaterial substances were not thought to be divine) pneumatology, which was defined as the general science of spirits i.

e. immaterial substances. Thus ontology came to correspond to metaphysics in the sense of the science of being qua being.

Most of the the first philosophers who referred to their work as ”ontol-ogy” defined ontology very similarly to Aristotle’s definition of metaphysics

as the science of being as being⁹ Indeed, the very word ”ontology” comes from the Greek word for being (as did equivalents such as ”ontosophy”), so the meaning of the word ”ontology” is clearly bound up with the no-tion of being even more than the word ”metaphysics”. However, Leibniz’s¹⁰

9The history of the origin of ontology as a new science is quite complex. Finding out the origin of the word ”ontology” has turned out to be a work requiring lots of painstaking detection among historians of philosophy and historians of ideas, and may not be at an end. I will briefly describe this history and detection for the interested on the basis of the work of Raul Corazzon in [Cor11] athttp://www.ontology.co/pdf/history.pdfand Leo Freuler and Jose Ferrater Mora in [Mor63], which I have checked from primary sources and emended so far as I have been able to expending a reasonable amount of work. It is not necessary to follow the following excursus carefully to understand the main points of this chapter, but those who want to assure themselves of the historical soundness of my view of ontology rather have to go into the details and if they do not truth my presentation check it themselves in Corazzon’s and Freuler’s and Mora’s works and in the (usually Latin) primary sources which they can find. It was long believed that the first use of the Latin form of the word, ”ontologia”, was in the Cartesian Scholastic Johannes Clauberg (1622-1665), then it was thought that it was found in Rudolf G¨ockel’s (aka Rudolf Goclenius’s, 1547-1628)Lexicon Philosophicumfrom 1613, where Goclenius in a marginal note defines ontology (written in Greek) as ”philosophia de ente”, philosophy concerning being (or beings). However, still newer research indicates that the origin of the word is in a book by Jacob Lorhard (aka Lorhardus); this was first thought to be hisTheatrum Philosophicum from 1613, but it was later discovered that Lorhard had earlier used the word in an earlier version of the same book,Ogdoas Scholastica, from 1606 (which again was based on an earlier work, Clemens Timpler’sMetaphysicae Systema Methodicum, where however the new word does not yet appear). After this such philosophers as Johannes Clauberg used the word ”ontologia”, together with an alternative, ”ontosophia” i.e. ”ontosophy” -wisdom concerning being rather than doctrine concerning being. This was a time when many new terms for scholarly disciplines were coined, of which some came later into general use while others (noology, angelography, etc.) have been utterly forgotten; even the word ”psychology” dates from this time. However, the coining of a new word and the discovery of a new discipline are not at all the same thing, and the earliest uses of the word

”ontology” are philosophically quite uninteresting, even if they must be mentioned for the sake of historical accuracy. The first philosophers who used the word did not usually say much about what they considered ontology to be and when they said something they often identified ontology with metaphysics, as is generally done today, but nevertheless gave different definitions to the two words so that even if they thought them to denote the same science they yet differed in meaning, ontology being the science of being as being.

However, soon a difference was made between the disciplines denoted by the two terms, though of course even then all who used the two words did not distinguish their meanings in the same way. The same distinction had of course already been done (e. g. by the Jesuit Benito Pereira (1535-1610), who spoke of metaphysics as a general science and natural theology as a special science) without using these exact terms - instead of ontology and metaphysics philosophers spoke of general metaphysics and special metaphysics, etc.

10Leibniz himself apparently followed Aristotle in using all of his definitions and taking them to be equivalent, at least if we can trust the interpretation of Ross in [Ros88]; Leibniz apparently characterized metaphysics both as the discipline concerned with those things that are common to every genus of beings i. e. as the science of being qua being -and as the science of immaterial reality. While Wolff is often though to be little more than a pedantic systematizer and popularizer of Leibniz, this shows that he yet had some originality in his division of the philosophical disciplines and other such methodological

follower and popularizer Christian Wolff was the most famous of the early philosophers to use the word. In [Wol30,§1] (see [Wol05, pages 8-19] for a modern German translation) he defines ontology as the science of Being in general or of Being as Being (scientia entis in genere, seu quatenus ens est).

This change is obviously connected with the secularization of meta-physics. If all three Aristotelian definitions of metaphysics are assumed to be equivalent (or indeed even if just one-way implication is assumed between them), this implies assuming that a materialistic world-view is nec-essarily false, since it implies that the same science deals with the most fundamental entities and immaterial entities, and therefore that the most fundamental entities are immaterial. However, the mere assumption that metaphysics deals with separated i. e. immaterial substances already con-tains very strong religious assumptions. The immaterial substances (such as Aristotle’s Intelligences or prime movers) have usually and naturally been understood as religiously significant entities, either gods (in polytheistic re-ligions such as the Greek religion probably presupposed by Aristotle and his followers) or the one God or (if God is understood as being so high that he cannot even belong to any genus, as was commonly the case in philosophies affected by Neoplatonism) as angels (in monotheistic religions as in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to which medieval and many later Aristotelians be-longed). Therefore if reference to separate entities is taken to be part of the very definition of metaphysics then the existence of gods is presupposed by the possibility of metaphysics, and therefore religious presuppositions are connected with the very notion of ontology.

Of course, the definition can be weakened so that such presuppositions are eliminated, and metaphysics would be taken to deal with the question of whetherseparate entities exist and if so what they are. However, while such a weakened definition would avoid controversial presuppositions, it would yet not apply to all enquiry that has been commonly thought of as metaphysical in later philosophy; even philosophers who are atheists and materialists can disagree sharply about many questions which would commonly be taken to be metaphysical (e. g. are the fundamental entities material substances or material processes, etc.).

However, the definition of metaphysics or ontology as the science of being as being does not have any such obvious religious presuppositions. There has

points; and as we shall see, these original ideas of Wolff proved influential and fruitful.

indeed been one way to interpret that definition that would cause it to have such presuppositions. Neoplatonistic philosophers reified being into Being Itself and went on to deify it. This kind of interpretation can be found for example in the commentary of the late pagan Neoplatonist Syrianus on Aristotle’s metaphysics, as seen for example in the following quotation (typically sublime or pompous - according to your taste - in its style) from its translation in [Syr08, page 90]:

For either there is is something which is, and is nothing else (such as intellect, or soul, or the heavens, or the world), uniquely existing as what is, as Being itself (autoon), clearly more worthy than all else, itself not needing to be a world, or the heavens, or soul, whereas all the rest receive their being from it.

While this is presented as a disjunction, it is clear from the context that Syrianus accepted the first disjunct (and in fact probably both disjuncts).

Syrianus understood this Being Itself as a god, though not the highest god in his complicated system, since Unity itself or the One (identified by him with the Good) was higher than even it. Most medieval scholastics, though Aristotelians rather than Platonists, such as Thomists, yet followed Neo-platonists in this, since they had to accept as authoritative the writings of church fathers (like Augustine) who were Christian Neo-Platonists and were influenced by pagan Neo-Platonists; they of course had to identify this Being itself with the highest since the sole God of their theology. Martin Heidegger, the founder of existentialism, followed this line of thought in his most famous work, translated in [Hei62], as he also held that ontology had to consider Being (Sein) itself and not beings, though he opposed what he called ontotheology and so was not willing to identify this Being itself with any god as the Neo-Platonists and scholastics did (though the way in which Heidegger speaks of Being has a very mystical and reverent sound, such as is typically associated with talk regarding something divine, even if not always personal). There are some modern interpreters who think that this interpretation or a very similar one is correct; e. g. Philip Merlan in [Mer68].

However, this theory is on the face of it highly counterintuitive and was partly made just so that the two notions of metaphysics would coin-cide. Furthermore, the theory is more likely to come from Platonism and Pythagoreanism (as Syrianus partly admits) than to have been part of

Aris-totle’s original intentions, even though medieval Aristotelians who mixed Neoplatonic ideas with Aristotelian ideas adopted it. Indeed, in Metaphysics 1060a38-1060b6 (see [Ari35, pages 60-63]) Aristotle seems to have explicitly argued against this kind of theory, arguing that Being itself or Unity itself cannot be principles (as Syrianus later supposed). Of course, this does not imply that the Neoplatonic theory of Being itself and Unity itself would not be metaphysical theory, as it clearly is a metaphysical theory, though not an Aristotelian metaphysical theory. However, it indicates that unless Aris-totle was blatantly inconsistent, he cannot have intended that his definition of metaphysics as the science of being qua being would be read so that it would have implies such a theory since he himself rejected it. Therefore such a theory cannot belong to metaphysics on the basis of its definition.

This kind of interpretation seems to me to misunderstand how the ex-pressions ”being qua being” or ”being as being” and indeed how exex-pressions like ”qua” and ”so far as” are used. I think S. Marc Cohen puts the error in the Neo-Platonic interpretation well in [Coh12] :

So Aristotle’s study does not concern some recondite subject matter known as being qua being. Rather it is a study of being, or better, of beings - of things that can be said to be - that studies them in a particular way: as beings, in so far as they are beings.

In any case, whatever Aristotle himself may have thought, this charac-terization is surely not a promising formulation for a modern metaphysician to start from; while both nominalists and sparse realists like Armstrong would reject the existence of Being itself outright, even promiscuous realists who might accept that such an entity exists are not likely to be favourable to Syrianus’s view that Being itself would be more worthy than anything else. Surely not only good things but also worthless and evil things exist;

suffering and malevolence and other such things also exist i e. have being, and it is surely worse that such things are than that they would not be, so being is by no means good as such. Also even Syrianus goes on to re-mark (see [Syr08, page 92]) that metaphysics considers (besides this Being itself) all beings, calling metaphysics a ”science of all beings”. Surely even a philosopher who does not think that this Being itself exists, or that there is much to say about it, can still consider all beings as beings.

It follows that metaphysics or ontology in the sense of the science (or discipline) concerned with being as being may be possible even if there are no separate substances and no gods or angels. Therefore even atheists and agnostics can accept that ontology in this sense is possible even if they do not accept the possibility of natural theology. Of course someone who ac-cepts this definition can still accept natural theology and even view it as closely connected to ontology (as Wolff himself obviously did); the point is that this definition of ontology is neutral between religious and irreli-gious philosophies. It is no wonder then that many, perhaps most reliirreli-gious philosophers such as neo-scholastics (e. g. Etienne Gilson, Joseph Owens and Philip Merlan in [Mer53]) typically oppose the separation of ontology and natural theology, viewing it as a corruption of Aristotle’s original no-tion of metaphysics (though it is rather curious that in this they oppose the medievals, who otherwise are their models). For instance, Owens says in [Owe63, page 25] that

in Aristotle an ontology is impossible. ”Ontology” is here under-stood in its historically authentic meaning of a general science of Being qua Being that is in some way, at least partially, distinct from a philosophical theology.

However, this opposition is not universal even among neo-scholastics; J´ozef M. Boche´nski thought contrary to them in [Boc74, page 284] that Wolff’s conception of ontology was quite in the Aristotelian spirit.¹¹ However, there is no historical reason to deny that this separation is at least as natural a development of Aristotle’s conceptions as their own. Moreover, if religious philosophers want to have a metaphysical debate with irreligious ones, then they must be willing to accept a neutral starting point such as the definition of ontology as a science of being as being offers. We may even suspect that if ontology is to prosper (instead of being confined to a small stifling ghetto of true religious believers) or perhaps even survive in the multicultural, liberal culture hopefully coming into being today, then such secularization may be necessary.

11Boche´nski was also a neo-scholastic, but more logically oriented, being part of the Cracow Circle that tried to combine Neo-Thomism with modern logic. This Cracow Circle was in combining modern analytical philosophy with Aristotelianism an often neglected precursor of the Neo-Aristotelian current in modern analytical metaphysics, though of course most modern Neo-Aristotelians do not share their commitment to Catholic religion and base their Aristotelianism directly on Aristotle rather than on Thomas Aquinas.

There may of course be significant differences between Aristotle’s under-standing of the task of wisdom and Wolff’s conception of the task of ontol-ogy. To take perhaps the most important and famous example, it seems that Wolff understood ontology’s task as primarily the study of possible being (inspired by Leibniz’s use of the conception of possible worlds derived from the Scotist tradition) while Aristotle probably understood it as primarily the study of actual being (though this is also very debatable, and depends on how his obscure doctrine of potentiality is interpreted). ”Being,” Wolff says in [Wol30,§134, page 115], ”is what can exist and, consequently, that with which existence is not incompatible”:

Ens dicitur quod existere potest, consequenter cui existentia non repugnat.

This makes Wolff’s ontology in some respects a precursor of such modern possibilist metaphysical schemes as David Lewis’s; however, Wolff of course does not propound anything like Lewis’s indexical analysis of actuality, so his possibilism may have been less extreme than Lewis’s.

Later ontologists have often gone so far as to take this concern with possibility as a defining characteristic of ontology. This includes both early successors of Wolff such as Christian August Crusius (1715-1775) in [Cru66]

and also relatively recent ontologists.

2.1.3 Recent History of the Concepts of Metaphysics and