by Raul Corazzon - e-mail: rc[at]ontology.co

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For an overview see the Index of the Pages or the Alphabetical Index of the Philosophers: A-F - G-O - P-Z; you can also download the page as

Change of Address: The site www.formalontology.it is now at www.ontology.co

Theory and History of Ontology from a Philosophical Perspective

Ontology: Index of the Sections

Index of the Pages

Theory

History

Ontological Topics in the History of Philosophy

Pages in Languages other than English

Index of the Bibliographies on Selected Authors

Index of the Bibliographies on Selected Arguments

List of the Essays in PDF format

Content and Objectives of this Site

Theory

• Definitions by Leading Philosophers
• The Vocabulary of Ontology
• Selected Ontological Topics
  • Language and Ontology
  • Semiotics and Ontology
  • Modern Theories of Predication
  • The Problem of Universals
• Pathways to Western Philosophy
• Pathways to Non-Western Philosophy

History

• Semantics and Predication Before Aristotle: Parmenides and Plato
• Metaphysics or Ontology? The Debate about the Subject Matter of First Philosophy
• The Arabic Rediscovery of Aristotle's Metaphysics
• The 'Second Beginning' of Metaphysics
• The Rise and Fall of Ontology in the Modern Era from Suárez to Kant
• The Rediscovery in Contemporary Thought
• Table of Formal and Descriptivists Ontologists
• Ontologists of 19th and 20th centuries
• Living Ontologists

Ontological Topics in the History of Philosophy

• History of Logic in Relationship to Ontology in Western Thought
• History of the Theories of Categories
• History of the Theories of Truth in Western Philosophy
• The Problem of Universals in the Middle Ages
• Other Pages on the History of Philosophy
• Annotated Bibliographies of Historians of Philosophy

Overview

The Table of Formal and Descriptive Ontologists traces the main intellectual links from the major ontologists of Nineteenth century (Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, and Gottlob Frege) to contemporary thinkers.

Detailed information (bibliographies, abstract of relevant publications, and selections of critical judgments) for the thinkers mentioned in the Tables of Ontologists are partly available and will be completed in the near future; lesser informative links will be improved and replaced by new pages.

I will publish also (on separate web sites) pages in French, German and Italian with selections of critical studies available in these languages, but not translated in English.

An important feature of this site will be bibliographies about the history of ontology, selected authors and ontological topics that have not yet been covered in such detail; bibliographical entries will not only include the most relevant books, but also a selection of articles from about one hundred philosophical reviews; attention will be paid to the relations with logic, semantics and semiotics, in particular to the theories of predication and reference and to the relation between thought, language and the world.

The completion of this job will require some years; more than 11.400 bibliographic references are already available in the following languages, in decreasing order of frequency: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish; the bibliographies will be constantly expanded and updated, and new abstracts of existing entries will be added.

I wish to apologize to readers of other languages, not included only because of my foreign language limitations (my mother tongue is Italian), but I hope that students and researchers will find sufficient material for a more thorough study and will enjoy discovering many philosophical treasures, some little known, but in no way less significant.

Table of Contemporary Ontologists (click on the image to see the PDF file)

Suggested Readings: Theory

The following essays (in PDF format) may be considered an excellent introduction to the objectives of this web site:

• Descriptive, Formal and Formalized Ontologies by Roberto Poli - published in: Denis Fisette (ed.) - "Husserl's Logical Investigations reconsidered", Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2003 pp. 183-210 (Published with the kind permission of the Author).
• Conceptual Realism as Formal Ontology by Nino Cocchiarella - published in: Roberto Poli, Peter Simons (eds.) "Formal Ontology" - Kluwer, Dordrecht 1996) pp. 27-60. (Published with the kind authorization of Kluwer).

Suggested Readings: History

An overview of the current state of the art of the historical research can be found in two numbers of Quaestio. Yearbook of the History of the Metaphysics and one of Medioevo. Rivista di storia della filosofia medievale:

• Quaestio, vol. 5, 2006, Metaphysica - Sapientia - Scientia Divina. Subject and Status of First Philosophy in the Middle Ages, edited by Pasquale Porro.
• Quaestio, vol. 9, 2009, Origins and Developments of Ontology (16th-21th Century), edited by Costantino Esposito with the cooperation of Marco Lamanna.
• Medioevo, vol. 34, 2009, The Debates on the Subject of Metaphysics from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Age, edited by Marco Forlivesi.

Ontology: Related Sites

Three sites (currently under construction) which will be devoted to studies in Italian, French and German:

Teoria e Storia dell'Ontologia

Théorie et Histoire de l'Ontologie

Theorie und Geschichte der Ontologie

Mobile version of this site for phone and laptop users:

Theory and History (Mobile version)

PDF version of all the pages:

Theory and History (PDF version)