The Ontological Wall

The Ontological Presuppositions of the Ontological Argument*

JLhe most recent stage in the analysis of St. Anselm's Ontologi cal Argument is the modal-logical stage : if one wants to get clear as to what is wrong (or right) with it, one should phrase it in S5.1 I have misgivings about this maneuver, if it is claimed in the name of historical exegesis. While I think that the connnections between the Ontological Argument and modal logic are insightful and ...

The Ontological Attitude

Revisiting the Ontological Square

Considerations regarding predication in ordinary language as well as the ontology of relations suggest a refinement of the Ontological Square, a conceptual scheme used in many foundational ontologies and which consists of particular substrates as well as their types on the one hand and particular attributes as well as their types on the other hand. First, the distinction between particulars and...

The Modal Ontological Argument

We know more today about the second, or so-called 'modal', version of St. Anselm's ontological argument than we did when Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm brought it to the attention of philosophers some years ago. But there is still much to be learned. Criticisms of the modal ontological argument focus on its premises, namely (i) the claim that perfection, or maximal greatness, implies nec...

The Ontological Level

In 1979, Ron Brachman discussed a classification of the various primitives used by KR systems at that time1. He argued that they could be grouped in four levels, ranging from the implementational to the linguistic level (Fig. 1). Each level corresponds to an explicit set of primitives offered to the knowledge engineer. At the implementational level, primitives are merely pointers and memory cel...