Ontological in the context of "Idea"

Ousia (/ˈuːziə, ˈuːsiə, ˈuːʒə, ˈuːʃə/; Ancient Greek: οὐσία) is a philosophical and theological term, originally used in ancient Greek philosophy, then later in Christian theology. It was used by various ancient Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, as a primary designation for philosophical concepts of essence or substance. It is analogous to concepts of being and the ontological in contemporary philosophy. In Christian theology, the concept of θεία ουσία (divine essence) is one of the most important doctrinal concepts, central to the development of trinitarian doctrine.

The Ancient Greek term θεία ουσία (theia ousia; divine essence) was translated in Latin as essentia or substantia, and hence in English as essence or substance.

Moral realism (also ethical realism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately. This makes moral realism a non-nihilist form of ethical cognitivism (which accepts that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false) with an ontological orientation, standing in opposition to all forms of moral anti-realism and moral skepticism, including ethical subjectivism (which denies that moral propositions refer to objective facts), error theory (which denies that any moral propositions are true), and non-cognitivism (which denies that moral sentences express propositions at all). Moral realism's two main subdivisions are ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism.

Most philosophers claim that moral realism dates at least to Plato as a philosophical doctrine and that it is a fully defensible form of moral doctrine. A 2009 survey involving 3,226 respondents from mostly English-speaking universities, including mostly faculty members, PhDs and graduate students, found that 56% accept or lean toward moral realism (28%: anti-realism; 16%: other). A 2020 study found that 62.1% accept or lean toward realism. Some notable examples of robust moral realists include David Brink, John McDowell, Peter Railton, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Michael Smith, Terence Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau, G. E. Moore, John Finnis, Richard Boyd, Nicholas Sturgeon, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, and Peter Singer. Norman Geras has argued that Karl Marx was a moral realist. Moral realism's various philosophical and practical applications have been studied.

The philosophy of perception is concerned with the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world. Any explicit account of perception requires a commitment to one of a variety of ontological or metaphysical views. Philosophers distinguish internalist accounts, which assume that perceptions of objects, and knowledge or beliefs about them, are aspects of an individual's mind, and externalist accounts, which state that they constitute real aspects of the world external to the individual. The position of naïve realism—the 'everyday' impression of physical objects constituting what is perceived—is to some extent contradicted by the occurrence of perceptual illusions and hallucinations and the relativity of perceptual experience as well as certain insights in science. Realist conceptions include phenomenalism and direct and indirect realism. Anti-realist conceptions include idealism and skepticism. Recent philosophical work have expanded on the philosophical features of perception by going beyond the single paradigm of vision (for instance, by investigating the uniqueness of olfaction).

The unity of science is a thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole. The variants of the thesis can be classified as ontological (giving a unified account of the structure of reality) and/or as epistemic/pragmatic (giving a unified account of how the activities and products of science work). There are also philosophers who emphasize the disunity of science, which does not necessarily imply that there could be no unity in some sense but does emphasize pluralism in the ontology and/or practice of science.

Early versions of the unity of science thesis can be found in ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, and in the later history of Western philosophy. For example, in the first half of the 20th century the thesis was associated with the unity of science movement led by Otto Neurath, and in the second half of the century the thesis was advocated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in "General System Theory: A New Approach to Unity of Science" (1951) and by Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam in "Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis" (1958). It has been opposed by, for example, Jerry Fodor in "Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)" (1974), by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method (1975) and later works, by John Dupré in "The Disunity of Science" (1983) and The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (1993), by Nancy Cartwright in The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (1999) and other works, and by Evelyn Fox Keller in Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (2002) and other works.

Wilhelm Dilthey (/ˈdɪltaɪ/; German: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈdɪltaɪ]; 19 November 1833 – 1 October 1911) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science.

Dilthey has often been considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.

World disclosure (German: Erschlossenheit, literally "development, comprehension") is how things become intelligible and meaningfully relevant to human beings, by virtue of being part of an ontological world – i.e., a pre-interpreted and holistically structured background of meaning. This understanding is said to be first disclosed to human beings through their practical day-to-day encounters with others, with things in the world, and through language.

The phenomenon was described by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in the book Being and Time. It has been discussed (not always using the same name) by philosophers such as John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas, Nikolas Kompridis and Charles Taylor.

In Being and Time, the philosopher Martin Heidegger makes the distinction between ontical and ontological, or between beings and being as such. He labeled this the "ontological difference." It is from this distinction that he develops the concept of fundamental ontology (German: Fundamentalontologie).

The history of ontology in Western philosophy is, in Heidegger's terms, ontical, whereas ontology ought to designate fundamental ontology. He says this "ontological inquiry" is required to understand the basis of the sciences.