ABSTRACT
The first step in revindicating ontology is to appreciate that (α) philosophical ontology need not be dogmatic and transcendent, but may be conditional and immanent, taking as its subject matter not a world apart from that investigated by the sciences and other disciplines (a Platonic or Leibnizian noumenal realm), but just that world considered from the point of view of what can be established about it from conditional a priori or transcendental argument. One must then, of course, distinguish philosophical ontology, as so understood, from (β) specific scientific ontologies, that is, the entities posited or presupposed by some particular scientific theory or epistemic inquiry. I shall call such entities ontics; they may be positive (onts) or negative (de-onts), as I shall explain in the next section. Intermediate concepts of ontology are possible, e.g. designating orders of abstraction or particular configurations, but (α) and (β) are the concepts I shall be concerned with in this book. Ontology corresponds to what I have called the intransitive dimension and contrasts with, but also contains, epistemology or what I have called the transitive dimension, which must be conceived as including in principle the whole material and cultural structure of (past or present agent-dependent) society. Within this transitive process, its extrinsic or causal aspect contrasts with but again also contains, constellationally, the intrinsic or intentional, normative stream of action, so that, as I shall show in Chapter 5, reasons are, but do not exhaust, causes. Constellationality is a figure of containment of one term distinguished from an over-reaching term, from which the over-reached term may be diachronically or synchronically emergent. The relationship between intrinsic aspect, transitive process and intransitive reality is illustrated in Figure 3.1. I will be arguing for the constellational containment of (the possibility of) judgemental rationality in the intrinsic aspect within epistemic relativity in the transitive dimension within ontological realism in the intransitive dimension.
