History of the Word “Ontology”
What it is The philosophical lineage behind the word that computer science borrowed. Aristotle named the subject without naming the word: Britannica says the subject “was called ‘first philosophy’ by Aristotle in Book IV of his Metaphysics,” and Guarino, Oberle and Staab gloss his definition of it as the science of “being qua being,” meaning “the study of attributes that belong to things because of their very nature.” The Latin coinage came almost two thousand years later, and its priority is contested. Britannica credits Jacob Lorhard, who used ontologia in Ogdoas Scholastica in 1606. Ferrater Mora, writing without Lorhard, says “the first instance occurs in Rudolf Goclenius” in his Lexicon philosophicum of 1613. Johann Clauberg is often credited — Ferrater Mora names Eucken, Gilson, Pichler, Wundt and Heimsoeth as making that attribution — and rebuts it: Clauberg published Ontosophia only in 1647, after the term was already in use. Christian Wolff put it into general circulation with Philosophia prima sive ontologia in 1730; Ferrater Mora records his definition as scientia entis in genere, quatenus ens est, the science of being in general as being.
Key concepts Being qua being; first philosophy; general metaphysics versus special metaphysics; ontologia 1606; Wolff’s “demonstrative [i.e., rational and deductive] method”; Kant’s attack on general metaphysics; Husserl’s “formal ontology”; Heidegger’s Dasein; the split between ontology as a question about reality and ontology as an artifact you can build.
How you’d use it Use this history to keep three senses of the word apart when reading anything about ontologies. Sense one is the philosophical discipline: what exists. Sense two is a specific philosophical theory of what exists, which is why philosophers say “Quine’s ontology” the way engineers say “the FIBO ontology.” Sense three is the computer-science artifact: a file containing a formal vocabulary. Britannica records that “Wolff contrasted ontology, or general metaphysics, which applied to all things, with special metaphysical theories such as those of the soul, of bodies, or of God.” The same shape recurs in the engineering tradition, where Guarino, Oberle and Staab say “the primary purpose of top-level ontologies lies in providing a broad view of the world suitable for many different target domains” — see bfo-basic-formal-ontology.md and common-core-ontologies-cco.md for what that looks like in practice. The resemblance is mine to point out; no source in this corpus claims descent.
LLM angle none stated
Pitfalls & lessons Do not treat the engineering sense as a straightforward continuation of the philosophical one. Wolff’s ontology used a “demonstrative [i.e., rational and deductive] method” and, on Ferrater Mora’s account, took the human intellect to be capable of knowing the essence of things. Gruber, by contrast, describes formal ontologies as “designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria” — an engineering ontology is one of many possible models of the same domain. Reading across the two senses without marking the switch is my own warning, not a claim any source here makes: the slide is easy, and it can smuggle in a claim of objectivity the artifact has not earned.
Verdict Worth studying. It is the cheapest way to stop confusing the three senses of the word, and the general-versus-special split it records is the shape the engineering tradition later reinvented as upper versus domain ontologies.
Sources consulted
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/ontology-metaphysics
- https://www.ferratermora.org/essa_ontology.html
- https://www.etymonline.com/word/ontology
- https://iaoa.org/isc2012/docs/Guarino2009_What_is_an_Ontology.pdf
research/firecrawl/phil-britannica.mdresearch/firecrawl/phil-ferratermora.mdresearch/firecrawl/phil-etymonline.mdresearch/firecrawl/guarino-what-is-ontology.mdresearch/firecrawl/gruber-onto-design.md