Everything that is; that which participates in being. The entity (ens) is the most universal concept of ontology: everything that is in any way whatsoever is an entity — substances and accidents, the real and the ideal, the possible and the actual.
The entity presupposes being: without being there is no entity. This distinction between entity (ens) and being (esse) is foundational for Thomistic ontology. The person is the most perfect entity in all of nature (perfectissimum in tota natura, Thomas Aquinas). Personal ontology orders all entities into a hierarchy: the inorganic, the vegetative, the animal, personal (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 130–140).
Ontological classification:
- Subordinate concepts: Substance, Accident, Absolute Being, Utensil, Archphenomenon, and many more.
Ontological relations:
- presupposes: Being
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: Personhood, Chapter 2: Method
Thing
A thing — in the philosophical sense a something — is the ontological counterpart to the someone. Whereas the person possesses itself, has command over itself, and can never be wholly determined from without, the thing is essentially at one’s disposal. It has no interior self-subsistence, no interiority, no freedom. It can be used, consumed, and replaced without any injustice being done to it.
The distinction between person and thing is one of the most fundamental distinctions in all of philosophy. Robert Spaemann formulated it as the difference between someone and something. Thomas Aquinas spoke of the person as the most perfect being in all of nature — it is never a mere thing.
The Personalist Norm forbids treating a someone like a thing, instrumentalizing him or reducing him to his usefulness. Where this nonetheless happens — in the oblivion of the person — the dignity of the person is disregarded, even though it cannot be destroyed.
Event
A temporally bounded, completed process. Examples: conception, birth, death, a single encounter. Unlike enduring states (such as personhood) or faculties (such as reason), an event has a beginning and an end in time.
Ontological classification: Superordinate class: Entity
Color
The irreducible qualitative genus of coloredness. Goethe (Theory of Colours §175): THE paradigmatic archphenomenon — ‘beyond it lies nothing sensory.’ Husserl (Third Logical Investigation): ‘red’ cannot be defined, unlike ‘triangle’ or ‘circle’ — the mark of something intellectually ultimate.
Scheler uses color as an explicit analogy for values as archphenomena: ‘values reach us through feeling, as colors do through seeing.’ As a concrete moment, color is non-self-sufficient — it depends on spatial extension (Husserl). Yet the qualitative genus coloredness as such is irreducible and indefinable: it is accessible only in essential intuition, and cannot be decomposed by abstraction or definition.
Ontological relations:
- is a subclass of: Archphenomenon
Utensil
An object produced or used by persons that serves a particular practical purpose. Utensils are ontologically accidents of human action — they have no value of their own, but receive their moral relevance from the use that persons make of them.
In the ontology, the utensil stands as a class essentially distinct from the person: a person is never a utensil, a utensil is never a person. This ontological separateness is the formal expression of the Personalist Norm: the person may never be treated merely as a means. Whoever treats the person like a utensil commits a form of oblivion of the person (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 220–225).
Ontological classification:
- Superordinate concept: Entity
Ontological relations:
- essentially distinct from: Person
Chapter assignment: Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 5, a. 1 (ens and the transcendentals)
- Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, 1–2 (being as being — the object of First Philosophy)
- Spaemann, Robert: Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, transl. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (the distinction between someone and something)
- Husserl, Edmund: Logical Investigations, transl. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge, 2001. (Third Investigation: non-self-sufficient moments and color as archphenomenon)
- Scheler, Max: Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, transl. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. (values as archphenomena, the analogy to color)
See also
Being, Substance, Person, Technology, Mode of Being, Form of Existence, Absolute Being, Essential Law, Metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Person, Personalist Norm, Oblivion of the Person, Dignity, Someone