The Founders of Ontology: From Lorhard to Clauberg
Piotr Jaroszyński, Hugh P. McDonald · 2018
Ontology was founded in the milieu of protestant German academicians who, at the end of the sixteenth century, started to be increasingly interested in philosophy, which, as Hellenic, was rejected by some early protestant leaders. German professors decided that the main philosophical source to be studied was Francisco Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputations. This is how the Scotist idea of the object of metaphysics (the concept of being) dominated German philosophy. Since it was an era when many new neologisms were being invented, ontology was also coined as a better equivalent for the name metaphysics, probably by Jacob Lorhard (1606), and not by Christian Wolff or Goclenius. At the beginning, the two names (metaphysics and ontology) were used interchangeably, as well as many other neologisms, such as ontosophía. Finally, Johannes Clauberg described the difference between metaphysics and ontology (1647), which made it clear that ontology was understood in a Scotist way, and metaphysics in a Neoplatonic way (transphysics). Clearly, Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s metaphysics come from different sources than modern ontology.