Ontology Quotations

It is the faithfulness of God that allows epistemology to model ontology.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

To see what is general in what is particular, and what is permanent in what is transitory, is the aim of scientific thought.

Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation.

Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all.

It is well known that the central problem of the whole of modern mathematics is the study of transcendental functions defined by differential equations.

The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.

All sentences of the type 'deconstruction is X' or 'deconstruction is not X', a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts 'deconstruction', is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third-person present indicative: S is P.

Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.

This view [of the infinite], which I consider to be the sole correct one, is held by only a few. While possibly I am the very first in history to take this position so explicitly, with all of its logical consequences, I know for sure that I shall not be the last!

The world is too big and too intricate to conform to our ideas of what it should be like... Just because we invent myths and theories to explain away the chaos we're still going to live in a world that's older and more complicated than we'll ever understand.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.

We call infinite that thing whose limits we have not perceived, and so by that word we do not signify what we understand about a thing, but rather what we do not understand.

Neither the true nor the false roots are always real; sometimes they are imaginary; that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined.

Although my knowledge grows more and more, nevertheless I do not for that reason believe that it can ever be actually infinite, since it can never reach a point so high that it will be unable to attain any greater increase.

In my paper the fact the XY was not equal to YX was very disagreeable to me. I felt this was the only point of difficulty in the whole scheme...and I was not able to solve it.

The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct "actuality" of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however.

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.

The line has magnitude in one way, the plane in two ways, and the solid in three ways, and beyond these there is no other magnitude because the three are all.

Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

No human investigation can claim to be scientific if it doesn't pass the test of mathematical proof.

Infinity is a dark illimitable ocean, without bound.

Infinity is a fathomless gulf, into which all things vanish.

We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.