In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being. It investigates what types of entities exist, how they are grouped into categories, and how they are related to one another on the most fundamental level. Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that encompasses the classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include substances, properties, relations, states of affairs, and events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, including particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness, or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are related to other entities.
Edward Jonathan Lowe, usually cited as E. J. Lowe but known personally as Jonathan Lowe, was a British philosopher and academic. He was Professor of Philosophy at Durham University.
John Jamieson Carswell Smart was a British-Australian philosopher who was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He wrote several entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Galen John Strawson is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. He has been a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for many years, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Guardian. He is the son of philosopher P. F. Strawson. He holds a chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and taught for many years before that at the University of Reading, City University of New York, and Oxford University.
In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical concept of universals from a perspective that denies their presence in particulars outside the mind's perception of them. Conceptualism is anti-realist about abstract objects, just like immanent realism is.
Christopher Arthur Bruce Peacocke is a British philosopher known for his work in philosophy of mind and epistemology. His recent publications, in the field of epistemology, have defended a version of rationalism. His daughter, Antonia Peacocke, is also a philosopher, now at Stanford University, specialising in philosophy of mind.
Samuel D. Guttenplan is a professor in philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Guttenplan earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford with a dissertation directed by John McDowell. He has interests in the philosophies of mind, language, philosophical logic and ethics. His current work centres on the origins of human conceptual thought, and he is contracted to produce The Roots of Categorization for Oxford University Press in 2009–10.
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker is a British philosopher. His principal expertise is in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophical anthropology. He is known for his detailed exegesis and interpretation of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his critique of cognitive neuroscience, and for his comprehensive studies of human nature.
Alfred Edward Taylor, usually cited as A. E. Taylor, was a British idealist philosopher most famous for his contributions to the philosophy of idealism in his writings on metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and the scholarship of Plato. He was a fellow of the British Academy (1911) and president of the Aristotelian Society from 1928 to 1929. At Oxford he was made an honorary fellow of New College in 1931. In an age of universal upheaval and strife, he was a notable defender of Idealism in the Anglophone world.
Quietism in philosophy sees the role of philosophy as broadly therapeutic or remedial. Quietist philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive thesis to contribute, but rather that its value is in defusing confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects, including non-quietist philosophy. For quietists, advancing knowledge or settling debates is not the job of philosophy, rather philosophy should liberate the mind by diagnosing confusing concepts.
Penelope Mackie (1953–2022) was a British philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and philosophical logic, and was best known for her work on essence and modality. Mackie spent the majority of her career in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham (2004–22), having also held appointments at the University of Birmingham, Virginia Commonwealth University, and New College, Oxford.
Peter Henry George Aczel was a British mathematician, logician and Emeritus joint Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory, constructive set theory, and Frege structures.
Professor David Simon Oderberg is an Australian philosopher of metaphysics and ethics based in Britain since 1987. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He describes himself as a non-consequentialist or a traditionalist in his works. Broadly speaking, Oderberg places himself in opposition to Peter Singer and other utilitarian or consequentialist thinkers. He has published over thirty academic papers and has authored six books: The Metaphysics of Good and Evil, Opting Out: Conscience and Cooperation in a Pluralistic Society, Real Essentialism, Applied Ethics, Moral Theory, and The Metaphysics of Identity over Time. Professor Oderberg is an alumnus of the Universities of Melbourne, where he completed his first degrees, and Oxford where he gained his D.Phil.
Helen Catherine Steward, is a British philosopher and academic. She is currently Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Action at the University of Leeds. Her research focusses on Philosophy of Action, Free Will, Philosophy of Mind and Metaphysics.
Elizabeth Barnes is an American philosopher working in feminist philosophy, metaphysics, social philosophy and ethics. Barnes is a professor of philosophy at the Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia.
Richard Maxwell Gaskin is a British philosopher who is a professor at the University of Liverpool. He has published on metaphysics, philosophy of language and logic, and history of philosophy, as well as on philosophy of literature, literary theory, and the European literary tradition. Gaskin received his Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Philosophy, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in classics and philosophy at University College, Oxford, and has held academic posts at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, as well as at the University of Sussex.
Leila Tuulikki Haaparanta is a Finnish philosopher who works in analytic philosophy and the philosophy of logic. She is retired from the University of Tampere as a professor emerita.
Elizabeth Anne Broadbent is a full professor of health psychology at the University of Auckland. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi in 2021.
Janinka Greenwood is a New Zealand academic, playwright and poet. Since 2018, she has been professor emerita in the School of Teacher Education at the University of Canterbury.
