The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology.

Abstract

In Plato's Sophist, Socrates describes a battle between the Giants and the Gods. On the one side, there are philosophers who that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance the touch. On the other side, the God's of Plato's dialogue affirm that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodily forms. The history of Western philosophy can be seen as a battle between those that insist that the physical universe exists and those would claim that there is a much larger world which contains atemporal and nonspatial things as well. What distinguishes the former, the naturalists, from the latter, the ontologists, is ultimately the rejection or acceptance of atemporal or nonspatial existents. The central part of this book, and the battle, concerns the existence of universals. Starting with the mediaeval definition of the issue found in Porphry and Boethius, the author then considers modern and contemporary versions of the battle. He concludes that what is at stake between naturalists and the ontologists is the existence and nature of a number of important categories. These categories consist of, for example, structures, relations, sets, numbers and so on. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in the field of philosophy.

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