Truth and Ontology

Trenton Merricks’ Truth and Ontology

One of the many remarkable things about Trenton Merricks’ Truth and Ontology is the incredibly wide range of issues discussed therein. I not only enjoyed (and profited from) thinking through the plentitude of always interesting and frequently convincing arguments made throughout the book, but I also discovered (in Fall 2009) that it’s an excellent book to assign for a high-powered class on cont...

Truth and Fundamentality: on Merricks’s Truth and Ontology

Truth and Ontology is a lively book, brimming with arguments, and drawing the reader towards the radical conclusion that what is true does not depend on what there is. If there is a central line of argument, it is that the best account of truthmaking requires truths to be about their truthmakers, but negative existentials, modals, and claims about the past and future are not about what is, but ...

Truth, Scientific Understanding and Haugeland’s Existential Ontology

Ontology Debugging with Truth Maintenance Systems

An ontology is a description of a particular domain in terms of its concepts and relationships. Ontologies can be used by ‘intelligent agents’ to model their environment and communicate with other agents. The quality of ontologies are therefore crucial to the performance of intelligent agents. However, as with any other knowledge base, there is always the possibility that an ontology have some ...

Walåyah and Islamic ontology

The present paper aims at clarifying the role of the concept “walåyah” in the philosophy of the unity of being in Islamic philosophy (waedat al-wujid). The concept “walåyah” is deeply built into the philosophic system of the Islamic theory of being, and moreover the dynamic aspect of this concept has always activated Islamic philosophy of existence and stimulated the thought of Islamic philosop...