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Ontology is the philosophical study of being.It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality.As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every entity within it.
More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of terms and relational expressions that represent the entities in that subject area. The field which studies ontologies so conceived is sometimes referred to as applied ontology. [1]
Individuals (instances) are the basic, "ground level" components of an ontology. The individuals in an ontology may include concrete objects such as people, animals, tables, automobiles, molecules, and planets, as well as abstract individuals such as numbers and words (although there are differences of opinion as to whether numbers and words are classes or individuals).
In ontology, the theory of categories concerns itself with the categories of being: the highest genera or kinds of entities. [1] To investigate the categories of being, or simply categories, is to determine the most fundamental and the broadest classes of entities. [2]
Carman elaborates: Heidegger's fundamental ontology is relevant to traditional ontology in that it concerns "what any understanding of entities necessarily presupposes, namely, our understanding of that in virtue of which entities are entities". [2] This ontological difference (German: ontologische Differenz) is central to Heidegger's philosophy.
Dominant approaches to ontology in the 20th century were phenomenology, linguistic analysis, and naturalism. Phenomenological ontology, as exemplified by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, relies for its method on the description of experience.
Willard Van Orman Quine provided an early and influential formulation of ontological commitment: [4]. If one affirms a statement using a name or other singular term, or an initial phrase of 'existential quantification', like 'There are some so-and-sos', then one must either (1) admit that one is committed to the existence of things answering to the singular term or satisfying the descriptions ...
The concept of ontology and what people mean by ontology is diverse; therefore, tracing the ontological turn in anthropology remains difficult. However, if ontology refers to the study of reality then ontological anthropology incorporates theoretical and methodological elements of anthropology to a study of being or existence. [3]