Abstract

Author: Paź Bogusław Title: ONTOLOGY VERSUS METAPHYSICS. GENESIS, DEVELOPMENT AND DIFFERENT FORMS OF THE MODERN THEORY OF BEING (Ontologia versus metafizyka? Geneza, rozwój i różne postaci nowożytnej teorii bytu) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.15, number: 2011/4, pages: 817-847 Keywords: ONTOLOGY, MODERN METAPHYSICS, ESSENCE, ESSENTIALISM, IDEA, REPRESENTATIONISM, RATIONALISM Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The paper presents the process of modern metaphysics transforming into the ontology. The major points of this process became: 1) scholastic sources of Catholic metaphysics represented by Fonseca, Suarez, Śmiglecki on the one side and Protestant metaphysics, represented by Goclenius and Clauberg, on the other; 2) Descartes’ epistemology of representation and 3) Leibniz’s rational and pluralistic metaphysics (monadology). The climax of the transformation process appears to be “Philosophia prima sive ontologia” (1729), a masterpiece being written by Wolff, where the first system of the ontology (science about being as possibility) was presented as a discipline independent from the traditional metaphysics. However starting with the Kant’s works ontology no longer was the discipline of knowledge about the real world but has being turned into a field of aprioristic categories of thinking about an existence and the physical world