Ontology quotes:

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Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on? -- Robert Anton Wilson
Brilliant. The Ontology Project is a post-graduate course in card magic. -- Jim Steinmeyer
The final philosophy is the ontology of God. -- Kedar Joshi
A good proof is one that makes us wiser. -- IU?. I. Manin
Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all. -- Herbert Marcuse
The ultimate philosophical challenge is to reveal the ontology of God. -- Kedar Joshi
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan
It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology. -- John Polkinghorne
We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology. -- Deepak Chopra
I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste. -- Marcel Duchamp
There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology. -- Terence McKenna
ALGEBRA is a general Method of Computation by certain Signs and Symbols which have been contrived for this Purpose, and found convenient. -- Colin Maclaurin
It is well known that the central problem of the whole of modern mathematics is the study of transcendental functions defined by differential equations. -- Felix Klein
The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct "actuality" of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however. -- Werner Heisenberg
Many persons entertain a prejudice against mathematical language, arising out of a confusion between the ideas of a mathematical science and an exact science. ...in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science. -- William Stanley Jevons
In my paper the fact the XY was not equal to YX was very disagreeable to me. I felt this was the only point of difficulty in the whole scheme...and I was not able to solve it. -- Werner Heisenberg
Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature. -- Ian Hacking
How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard. -- Willard Van Orman Quine
Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. -- Willard Van Orman Quine
The Western World has been brainwashed by Aristotle for the last 2,500 years. The unconscious, not quite articulate, belief of most Occidentals is that there is one map which adequately represents reality. By sheer good luck, every Occidental thinks he or she has the map that fits. Guerrilla ontology, to me, involves shaking up that certainty. -- Robert Anton Wilson
The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true. -- Willard Van Orman Quine
The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type. -- Georg Cantor
All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P. -- Jacques Derrida
When the boy begins to understand that the visible point is preceded by an invisible point, that the shortest distance between two points is conceived as a straight line before it is ever drawn with pencil and paper...the fountain of all thought has been opened to him...the philosopher can reveal him nothing new, as a geometrician he has discovered the basis of all thought. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation. -- Fredric Jameson
Much of what Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science has now passed into mainstream thought, into the currency of that nebulous, tricky ontology known as 'common sense.' -- Liz Williams

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