Philosophy is a knowledge that is based on rational thought. It is a discipline formed by a series of branches: metaphysics, logic, ethics, epistemology, etc. One of the branches of philosophy is precisely ontology.
In the Western philosophical tradition, the term ontology is used synonymously with metaphysics. Regarding its definition, ontology is the study of reality and, therefore, an ontological reflection will deal with analyzing the concept of reality in general, what Aristotle called Being. It is not about something particular and concrete ( a specific being) but from the general idea of Being.
Different planes of the ontological
Philosophical reflection is chronologically prior to science and in this sense some thinkers considered that there was a supreme genre of things and this supreme genre is the concept of Being, so ontological knowledge deals with understanding what is beyond the own things.
Some philosophical currents have understood that what goes beyond reality itself refers to a priori concepts, that is, ideas that exist in the human understanding and that do not depend on experience (for example, the idea of time or space) .
There are philosophical approaches that understand Being as a general and ultimate principle and this principle is identified with the idea of God. Other perspectives conceive the ontological as the understanding of the essence of what exists in reality. In other words, for a thing to exist it has to be something, so it is necessary to reflect on the being of things and this is dealt with by the ontological analysis.
The thinkers who have followed an ontological and metaphysical analysis consider that this type of reflection allows us to understand concrete realities, since the anthology deals with the first principles, from which it is possible to think about all the concrete aspects of reality. In fact, they understand that the very concept of reality is ontological, since there is nothing concrete that is "reality".
Certain ontological perspectives deal with the study of reality based on formal criteria; for example, the structures of language or logic that act as general categories.
There are philosophical currents that make a harsh criticism of any ontological approach and argue that it makes no sense to build theories about reality that are not strictly scientific. However, there are philosophical approaches that try to make the ontological and the scientific compatible.
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