Along with the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the modern period witnessed many changes in the discipline of philosophy. One significant change was the transformation of metaphysics into ontology. In this book, Piotr Jaroszynski has produced a very impressive account of how this transformation took place and how various philosophical questions, positions taken, and cultural factors led, directly or indirectly, to the rise of ontology.
It is an important work for at least two reasons. First, it improves our understanding of the history of philosophy. Well-researched and comprehensive, it covers all the major thinkers and camps with respect to metaphysics and ontology. Jaroszynski displays a great command of primary sources and the pertinent secondary literature. Second, it deepens our philosophical understanding of metaphysics, while treating in detail important differences between metaphysics and ontology. In this way it will be useful to a wide range of philosophers. Realist philosophers, especially those in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, will be particularly interested in it because Jaroszynski defends a realist understanding of metaphysics, arguing that the proper object of metaphysics is being.
After a discussion of the rise of philosophy among the ancient Greeks, the rise of metaphysics with Aristotle, and the influence that different sets of commentators have had on interpreting Aristotle, Jaroszynski traces the most important stages in the historical transformation of metaphysics into ontology. Here he analyzes the philosophical connections among Descartes, the British empiricists, the early German founders of ontology (from Lorhard to Clauberg), Wolff, Kant, Hegel, Bolzano, Frege, Meinong, Husserl, Ingarden, Heidegger, process philosophers, postmodernists, and others. What emerges from his analysis is that the nominalism prevalent in thinkers toward the end of the Middle Ages, such as Duns Scotus, helped prepare the shift from metaphysics to ontology.
Scotus was influential indirectly, through the work of Francisco Suárez. The early German founders of ontology relied upon Suárez to understand Scholastic metaphysics in order, as Protestants, to argue against Catholic theology and philosophy. The precursor to ontology was contained in Suárez’s understanding of being, which he largely adopted from Scotus. In contrast to Scotus, Thomas had argued that existence was primary in the order of being. There is a real distinction in creatures between existence and essence because existence is related to essence as actuality to potentiality. Additionally, Thomas maintained that existence could not be known through a concept, but through the act of judgment. Scotus, however, rejected the real distinction between existence and essence and he rejected existence as primary. Instead, existence was understood as a modality of essence, which was understood conceptually. Essence became primary and the object of metaphysics began to shift from being to the concept of being.
For Scotus, non-contradiction set the boundary for the concept of being. Anything that was capable of existence, even if it did not currently exist, was included in the concept of being. As a result, metaphysics became the study of possibility (possible being) and not the study of reality (actually existing being). In his highly influential Disputationes Metaphysicae (Metaphysical Disputations), Suárez sided with Scotus against Thomas on this issue. In this way Scotus and Suárez laid the foundation upon which later thinkers would transform metaphysics into ontology.
Jaroszynski treats in depth the evolution of the object of metaphysics from being to the concept of being to, finally, the object (i.e., object of thought). Whereas possible being must be non-contradictory, an object of thought includes anything a human being can think or speak of, including contradictions and nothingness. Existence is irrelevant to objects of thought. However, when either the concept of being or object of thought replaces existence as the object of metaphysics it becomes something other than metaphysics—it becomes ontology, or something beyond ontology.
Beyond names, what is at stake are the most fundamental and important questions human beings can ask. These include questions about God, truth, meaning, morality, human nature and happiness, and how to best order human society. Classical metaphysics, as the study of existing reality, can treat these questions. Ontology, however, cannot. This is because ontology, as Jaroszynski notes, only investigates concepts and possibility. Other sciences cannot replace the need for metaphysics because they merely investigate a selected aspect of reality. Only classical metaphysics investigates reality precisely as reality.
Metaphysics or Ontology? is the culmination of many years of study and research. It masterfully treats not only the history of the controversy, but also many important metaphysical questions that have been raised over the centuries. These include questions such as (1) How should we understand being—as real or possible? (2) How should we understand existence—as actuality or as a mode of essence? and (3) Which has priority, essence or existence? This is a book that will reward the reader with new insights each time it is read; it deserves the special attention of scholars and philosophers for decades to come.
Robert Anthony Delfino
St. John’s University, New York