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A recent essay by Peter van Inwagen opens with the observation that "Ontology is a very old subject, but "ontology" is a relatively new word" (van Inwagen 2009: 472). Indeed, as a topic warranting systematic study, the subject is usually traced back to Aristotle or Parmenides, while the word, in its Latin form "ontologia", is not known to have appeared in print until German philosopher Jacob Lorhard's Ogdoas Scholastica in 1606.¹ It is uncontroversial, because it is evident in the word itself, that "ontology" signifies the study (or theory, discourse, science) of being or that which is. This general definition is reiterated at points in Bhaskar's work,² and it is present in Kant's as well, though in a more nuanced form. In Kant's lecture courses on metaphysics there are clear and succinct expressions of his conception of ontology, which he inherited from the rationalist metaphysicians Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten. There, ontology is defined as "the science (…) which is concerned with the more general properties of all things' (TP1 295) and "the science of the properties of all things in general" (LM 140), and it is said that "Ontology thus deals with things in general, it abstracts from everything particular" (ibid. 307) and "Ontology (… ) contains the summation of all our pure concepts that we can have a priori of things' (ibid. 308). Similarly, Baumgarten's Metaphysics, which Kant often used as the textbook for his metaphysics courses, defines ontology as "the science of the general predicates of a thing" (Baumgarten 1739: §4), while the second chapter of Wolff 1720, in which Wolff sets out the basic principles of his ontology, is titled "On the First Principles of Our Cognition and of All Things in General".³

DOI: 10.1057/9781137002723_2

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