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Ontology - Online Term Papers

Ontology

One of the most controversial debates in philosophy has been over the nature of being. In the Pre-Socratic era the dispute focused on whether change was constant while our human perceptions made static separations so that we could make sense of our environment, or if being exists omnipresently and that our perceptions of diversity in matter are false. Plato tries to solve this dilemma with his theory of an objective reality in a realm different from that which we experience. Aristotle agrees with Socrates except that he believes an object’s 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 ...

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will still be there. However, the exact water that flows through it is never the same. One can’t tell the difference between 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 like the river, forever changing in a process of erosion and creation.
Heraclitus’ 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 can’t be any place where being is not. According Parmenides’ purely logical view, all perception of vacuous space is an illusion.
Plato tried to solve this dilemma of with his theory of the forms. “You have before ...

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Ontology. (2004, October 19). Retrieved January 11, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Ontology/16134

"Ontology." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 19 Oct. 2004. Web. 11 Jan. 2026. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Ontology/16134>

"Ontology." Essayworld.com. October 19, 2004. Accessed January 11, 2026. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Ontology/16134.

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 10/19/2004 06:42:04 PM
Category: English
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 1164
Pages: 5

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