Dallas Willard Wholes , Parts and the Objectivity of Knowledge

Ontology has frequently been understood as the theory of the ultimate classes of existents or entities and of characteristics of and structures that belong to all entities merely as such. 1 Understood in this way acts of human cognition, for example, like all other events, obviously fall within the domain of ontology. There are thus also certain special or 'regional' ontologies, which attempt to exhibit the essential characteristics and structures peculiar to the members of each of the ultimate classes of entities of minds (and mental acts), physical bodies, and so on. But even given these special ontologies it is still not strictly true, as Gustav Bergmann has often said, that " ... epistemology is but the ontology of the knowing situation."2 There is a normative or criteriological aspect to epistemology that is not reducible to a mere ontological analysis of cognition. It nonetheless seems plausible to suppose that an adequate ontology of cognitive acts would be a necessary condition for the satisfactory execution of the normative inquiries in epistemology.3 The intent of this paper is to cast some light upon the relationship between ontology and the theory of knowledge, by explaining Edmund Husserl's use of certain general ontological structures to clarify the manner in which individual cognitive acts can h~ve an objective 'content' or in short, to clarify how knowledge as commonly understood is possible. In the process, some important but lesser known aspects of Hussert's philosophy will be explained. Our first step must be an explanation of how Husserl understood the problem of the objectivity of knowledge.