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Ontology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford.
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Extract

The questions traditionally known as ontological have sometimes been summed up in the deceptively simple interrogative: “What is there?” But this formulation is notoriously misleading, because it suggests that we are already quite clear as to what “Being” is, i.e. as to what we mean when we say of something, that it exists. And this is not always so. Moreover, when we make statements like, “Time exists”, “redness exists”, it is almost never so. Statements of this kind, of course, are very uncommon. We could imagine a situation in which they could have a use, but only a rhetorical use. We would be hard put to say how to go about answering them or debating them.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 34 , Issue 129 , April 1959 , pp. 125 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1959

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References

page 127 note 1 Cf. Introduction to Logical Theory, Ch. 6, III, 7. This sense of “presuppose” is closely related to that used by Mr. Strawson in this section, although not identical with it.

page 128 note 1 Concept of Mind.

page 131 note 1 P. 33. For another possible interpretation, see below, pp. 140–141.

page 131 note 2 Op. cit., p. 89.

page 132 note 1 Op. cit., p. 33.

page 132 note 2 The italics are mine.

page 132 note 3 Cf. “What is explanation?” (in Essays in Conceptual Analysis), by John Hospers.

page 133 note 1 Of course “everyday” explanation often borrows a great deal from natural science, but even so, the explanations have frequently a different sense in their “everyday” context. See below.

page 135 note 1 Of course Descartes was never guilty of the crass “Cartesianism” that is to justly pilloried in Concept of Mind. Mind and body were not separate, but were in “intimate union”. But the manner of their union remained obscure far philosophy. “It is in life and ordinary conversation and in abstaining from meditation and from the study of those things that exercise the imagination, that one learns to understand the union of soul and body” (Letter to Elizabeth, 28th June, 1643). The philosophical question to which vulgar Cartesianism is one answer remained.

page 136 note 1 Philosophical Investigations.

page 137 note 1 Of course, primitive languages differ among themselves as to ontology, and in particular the “primitive” part of our language is deeply impregnated with the ontology of physical sciences. But it is the internal homogeneity of our speech at a certain low level of sophistication which is under discussion here.

page 138 note 1 P. 133.

page 139 note 1 Strawson's lectures on “Individuals”.

page 140 note 1 M. M.–P.– Phénoméiologie de la Perception, e.g. p. 161.

page 140 note 2 For another interpretation, see above, pp. 130 et seq.

page 141 note 1 Concept of Mind, p. 89.

page 141 note 2 Ibid., p. 141.

page 141 note 3 E.g. op. cit., p. 147.