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In ontology
Ontology

Ontology in philosophy is the study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic category of being and their relations....
 (the study of being) being is anything that can be said to be, either transcendentally
Transcendence (philosophy)

In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey three different but related primary meanings, all of them derived from the word's literal meaning , of climbing or going beyond: one sense that originated in Ancient philosophy, one in Medieval philosophy, and one in modern philosophy....
 or immanently
Immanence

Immanence, derived from the Latin in manere "to remain within", refers to philosophical and metaphysical theories of the divine as existing and acting within the mind or the world....
.

The nature of being varies by philosophy, given different interpretations in the frameworks of Parmenides
Parmenides

Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy....
, Leucippus
Leucippus

Leucippus or Leukippos was the first to develop the theory of atomism ? the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms ? which was elaborated in far greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus....
, Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
, Aristotle
Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
, Plotinus
Plotinus

Plotinus was a major Philosophy of the ancient world who is widely considered the founder of Neoplatonism . Much of our biographical information about him comes from Porphyry 's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads....
, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre.


philosophers deny that the concept of "being" has any meaning at all, since we only define an object's existence by its relation to other objects, and actions it undertakes.






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In ontology
Ontology

Ontology in philosophy is the study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic category of being and their relations....
 (the study of being) being is anything that can be said to be, either transcendentally
Transcendence (philosophy)

In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey three different but related primary meanings, all of them derived from the word's literal meaning , of climbing or going beyond: one sense that originated in Ancient philosophy, one in Medieval philosophy, and one in modern philosophy....
 or immanently
Immanence

Immanence, derived from the Latin in manere "to remain within", refers to philosophical and metaphysical theories of the divine as existing and acting within the mind or the world....
.

The nature of being varies by philosophy, given different interpretations in the frameworks of Parmenides
Parmenides

Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy....
, Leucippus
Leucippus

Leucippus or Leukippos was the first to develop the theory of atomism ? the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms ? which was elaborated in far greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus....
, Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
, Aristotle
Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
, Plotinus
Plotinus

Plotinus was a major Philosophy of the ancient world who is widely considered the founder of Neoplatonism . Much of our biographical information about him comes from Porphyry 's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads....
, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre.


Being in continental philosophy and existentialism

Some philosophers deny that the concept of "being" has any meaning at all, since we only define an object's existence by its relation to other objects, and actions it undertakes. The term "I am" has no meaning by itself; it must have an action or relation appended to it. This in turn has led to the thought that "being" and nothing
Nothing

Nothing is a concept that describes the absence of anything at all. Colloquially, the concept is often used to indicate the lack of anything relevant or significant, or to describe a particularly unimpressive thing, event, or object....
ness are closely related, developed in existential
Existential

Existential may refer to:*Existential clause*Existential crisis*Existential fallacy*Existential humanism*Existential forgery*Existential risk...
 philosophy.

Existentialist philosophers such as Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre , commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre , was a French existentialism philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary criticism....
, as well as continental philosophers
Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who found it useful for referring to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic philo...
 such as Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German people philosopher, and with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, one of the creators of German idealism....
 and Heidegger
Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was an influential Germany Philosophy. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century....
 have also written extensively on the concept of being. Hegel distinguishes between the being of objects (being in itself
Being in itself

Being in itself is the self-contained and fully realized Being of objects. It is a term used in early 20th century continental philosophy, especially in the works of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the existentialism....
) and the being of people (Geist). Hegel, however, did not think there was much hope for delineating a "meaning" of being, because being stripped of all predicates is simply nothing.

Heidegger, in his quest to re-pose the original pre-Socratic questions of Being (of why is there something rather than nothing), wondered at how to meaningfully ask the question of the meaning of being, since it is both the greatest, as it includes everything that is, and the least, since no particular thing can be said of it. He distinguishes between different modes of beings: a privative mode is present-at-hand, whereas beings in a fuller sense are described as ready-to-hand. The one who asks the question of Being is described as Da-sein ("there/here-being") or being-in-the-world. Sartre, popularly understood as misreading Heidegger (an understanding supported by Heidegger's essay "Letter on Humanism" which responds to Sartre's famous address, "Existentialism is a Humanism"), employs modes of being in an attempt to ground his concept of freedom ontologically by distinguishing between being-in-itself and being-for-itself.

Being in Islamic philosophy

The nature of "being" has also been debated and explored in Islamic philosophy
Islamic philosophy

Islamic philosophy is a branch of Islamic studies, and is a longstanding attempt to create harmony between philosophy and the religious teachings of Islam ....
, notably by Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi, and Mulla Sadra
Mulla Sadra

?adr ad-Din Mu?ammad Shirazi also called Mulla Sadra was a Iranian philosophy Islamic philosophy, Kalam and Ulema who led the Iranian cultural renaissance in the 17th century....
.

Quotations

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being. - Carl Jung
Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of Analytical psychology. Jung's approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in counterculture movements across the globe....


Under the heading ‘Individuality in Thought and Desire’, Karl Marx
Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a Germanphilosophy, political economy, historian, sociologist, humanism, political theorist and revolutionary credited as the founder of communism....
, (German Ideology 1845), says:

"It depends not on consciousness, but on being; not on thought, but on life; it depends on the individual's empirical development and manifestation of life, which in turn depends on the conditions existing in the world."


See also

  • Atman
    Atman

    Atman may refer to a concept in several Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism:* Atman * Atman Atman may also refer to:...
  • Category of being
    Category of being

    In metaphysics , the different kinds or ways of being are called categories of being or simply categories. According to the Aristotle tradition, a being is anything that can be said to be in the various senses of this word....
  • Cogito ergo sum
    Cogito ergo sum

    "'" , sometimes misquoted as ' , is a philosophy statement in Latin used by Ren? Descartes, which became a foundational element of Western philosophy....
  • Creature
    Creature

    A creature is a living organism. The term is derived from a widespread historical belief in creationism. The word is generally used to refer to non-human Animal but does include humans, and it is also sometimes used to mean monster....
  • Entity
    Entity

    An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, though it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities....
  • Essence
    Essence

    In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance theory what it fundamentally is, and which it has by metaphysical necessity, and without which it loses its identity....
  • Existence
    Existence

    In common usage, existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses, but in philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, and is often contrasted with essence....
  • Existentialism
    Existentialism

    Existentialism is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point...
  • Human being
  • Hypostasis
  • Infosphere
    Infosphere

    Infosphere is a term used since the 1990s to speculate about the common evolution of the Internet, society and culture. It is a neologism composed of information and sphere....
  • Noumenon
    Noumenon

    The noumenon is a posited object or event as it is in itself, independent of the senses. It classically refers to an object of human inquiry, understanding or cognition....
  • Object (philosophy)
    Object (philosophy)

    In philosophy, an object is a thing, an entity, or a being. This may be taken in several senses.In its weakest sense, the word object is the most all-purpose of nouns, and can replace a noun in any sentence at all....
  • Ontology
    Ontology

    Ontology in philosophy is the study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic category of being and their relations....
  • Ousia
    Ousia

    Ousia is the Greek language noun formed on the feminine present participle of ; it is analogous to the English participle being, and the Greek ontic....
  • Phenomenon
    Phenomenon

    A phenomenon is any observation occurrence. In popular usage, a phenomenon often refers to an extraordinary event. In physics, a phenomenon may be a feature of matter, energy, or spacetime....
  • Substance theory
    Substance theory

    Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontology theory about Object , positing that a substance is distinct from its property ....
  • Supreme being
    Supreme Being

    The term wiktionary:Supreme Being is often defined simply as "God", and it is used with this meaning by theologians of many religious faiths, including, but not limited to, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Deism....
  • Fromm
    Fromm

    Fromm is a surname that may refer to:* Eric Fromm , a former tennis player from the United States* Erich Fromm , an internationally renowned German-American Jewish psychologist and humanistic philosopher...
     To Have Or To Be? 1976
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
    Phenomenology of Spirit

    Ph?nomenologie des Geistes is one of G.W.F. Hegel's most important philosophical works. It is translated as The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind due to the dual meaning in the German language word Geist....
  • Heidegger, Being and Time
    Being and Time

    Being and Time is a book by Germany philosophy Martin Heidegger. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, it remains his most important work and has profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, particularly existentialism, hermeneutics and deconstruction....
  • Sartre, Essays in Existentialism and Being and Nothingness
  • Pranopasana


External links