Question by Leon M: Difference between Ontology and Metaphysics?
What exactly is the difference between ontology and metaphysics? I’ve tried to find this out on my own using dictionaries and Google, but haven’t been able to figure it out completely. I know that ontology is a branch of metaphysics that is concerned with the nature of being. But metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of reality. Those sound kind of the same, and I’m not really sure how they’re different.
And while I’m at it, I might as well ask what the difference between phenomenalism and phenomonolgy is. The only thing I can think of is that the difference is like the difference between true skeptics like Pyrrho and the skepticism of Rene Descartes, where he used it as a method rather than as a belief system. Is this an accurate portrayal?
Best answer:
Answer by sophist
One is as a resident and the other as an observer.
Add your own answer in the comments!
The modern term “metaphysics” is more the “new age” stuff beyond the rational world. I suppose the official definition may be a study of reality, but who really uses it that way anymore?
Ontology is a legitimate philosophical pursuit of the knowledge of reality or existence. Metaphysics is irrational and emotional.
Metaphysics and Ontology
Since, for Levinas, metaphysics unfolds on the level of affectivity and ontology on the level of representation, and since the tradition sees ontology and metaphysics on the same level, it is important to distinguish these terms following Levinas’ usage before we examine his connection with Descartes. This distinction allows Levinas to use affectivity as a means of transcending the phenomenal world and moving toward the other. Metaphysics, in its deepest sense, is a movement, and not a representation. But, the history of philosophy since Aristotle has taken metaphysics as a branch of inquiry. It has placed ontology within metaphysics, taking both as a science of being. Levinas departs from this tradition, noting that ontology is already bound by representation. He sees, for instance, a theory of being in Husserl’s phenomenology, even though Husserl has no recourse to extra-mental “things.” This suggests that ontology is too late to capture the original meaning of metaphysics. Levinas writes:
‘The true life is absent.’ But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi. It is turned toward the ‘elsewhere’ and the ‘otherwise’ and the ‘other.’ For in the most general form it has assumed in the history of thought it appears as a movement going forth from a world that is familiar to us, whatever be the yet unknown lands that bounds it or that it hides from view, from an ‘at home’ which we inhabit, towards an alien outside-of-oneself, towards a yonder. (TI 33)
Phenomenology
~Phenomenology is the name of Husserl’s method of philosophizing
~It is a form of rigorous or demanding introspection
~The key to phenomenology is bracketing or epoké
~Since existential philosophy places no necessary restrictions on statements about mind, it is said to be phenomenological
~Phenomenology is really nothing but a pedantic version of the Socratic “know thyself”
Phenomenalism
(1) “What we know is dependent upon the activity of consciousness. The reality of an external, physical object is based on its being perceived by someone”
(2) “Reality is the totality of all possible conscious experience” (Peter A. Angeles, Dictionary of Philosophy (1981)