I honestly find them to be useless and outdated words. I have never used them, nor ever had need to use them in constructing a philosophical paper, or argument. I am not saying they did not have a use centuries ago, but when speaking in modern day English with people, I find them unnecessary. Often times people new to philosophy will attempt to use these words to sound like they are making a meaningful statement. I don't hold anything against them, you have to start somewhere after all, and a good place to start is usually using terms that seem to keep popping up. — Philosophim

Try these terms on Google Scholar search (or whatever citation index that is available to you). Here are works just from the last 1.5 years:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2019&q=metaphysics

Granted, these include many works on historical philosophy, but not only.

(Ontology is a little trickier, because it turns up as a specialist term outside of philosophy.)

Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. — Twilight of the Idols

:fire:

(emphasis is mine)

Of course, pace Hume (contra the "Fork" and therefore the "Guillotine" too) ...

Metaphysics, from online: "Branch of philosophy concerned with providing a comprehensive account of the most general features of reality as a whole; the study of being as such." — tim wood

In order to make post-Aristotlean (Copernican) sense of this Aristotlean (Ptolemaic) term, I substitute (A) theory (i.e. physics, etc) for "reality" and (B) presuppositions of theorizing (re: possible worlds) for "being as such" ...

... a comprehensive account of the most general features of theory, or what constitutes a fundamental explanation of any possible world; the study of possible worlds necessarily presupposed by theorizing as such.

And whether explicitly or not, to discursively reason (i.e. Freddy's "faith in grammar") is to theorize - explain, describe, dissemble, justify, confabulate, etc.

"Ontology" ... from online, "Branch of metaphysics concerned with identifying, in the most general terms, the kinds of things that actually exist."

"Kinds", or the common denominator, "of things that actually exist" (i.e. 'ways the world could possibly have been' ...) entail negation of impossible-to-exist predicates (i.e. excluding 'ways the world necessarily could not possibly have been' ...) I understand "ontology" (1) in an apophatic manner and (2) in actualist terms, thereby conceive of it as a criterion for discerning 'the presuppositions of theorizing' (mentioned above).

And this thread is not about Aristotle's Metaphysics specifically. It is about what we understand now or can or should understand now about these words.

Good. I'm much more interested in what we can make of and do with "metaphysics" and "ontology" for tomorrow than whatever has been failed to be done speculatively for millennia. Like anybody, I'm groping around "in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there" ...

Metaphysics I think is best thought of in terms of explicating the status of those commitments. So traditionally, metaphysics had to do with the study of necessary beings, aligned with the temporality of eternity. In which case you're dealing with questions of modality and temporality. A different metaphysics might yield a different conception of both, so that one relaxes the commitment to necessity and pays more attention to contingency and the so-called sublunary aspects of 'becoming' and so on.

Condensed, one can say that if ontology deals with 'what', metaphysics deals with 'how'.

[ ... ]

If one ontology commits one to general terms and general features, then so it. — StreetlightX

Beat me to it and more clearly and succinctly stated. :up:

An easy read. — StreetlightX

This intrinsically stable and lasting character of Being in Greek -­ - which makes it [Being] so appropriate as the object of knowing and the correlative of truth -- distinguishes it in a radical way from our modern notion of ‘existence’. — P.8 (3)

:ok:

And it has, you'll note, nothing to do with the first-person in any way, shape, or form.

Noted. But the point that interests me is the article distinguishes the sense of ‘being’ from our customary use of the word ‘existence’. This is the distinction I want to preserve. And it is the case that the word ‘Ontology’ ‘itself was originally derived from the Latin ontologia (1606, Ogdoas Scholastica, by Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus)), from Ancient Greek ὤν (ṓn, “on”), present participle of εἰμί (eimí, “being, existing, essence”) + λόγος (lógos, “account”) ¹ . And the present participle of ‘to be’ is, in English, ‘I am’, although in conjugated languages, such as Latin, the participle ‘I’ is implied (cf. ‘cogito’, ‘I think’.)

And the present participle of ‘to be’ is, in English, ‘I am’, — Wayfarer

What? No it isn't. A present participle always ends with an -ing, which, in this case, would be simply be 'being'.

the participle ‘I’ — Wayfarer

"I" is not a participle. Who butchered your grammatical education like this?

Meant ‘pronoun’. Anyway, an interesting essay.

Meant ‘pronoun’ — Wayfarer

No you really didn't, because you've repeated this made-up grammatical point over and over again in your various posts on this topic. In your first post you even referred to a 'first person participle' which... is not a grammatical category. Like, it's a made-up phrase. And say you meant "pronoun" - "the pronoun of 'to be' is 'I am'"? That doesn't make sense either.

Ontology is the study of ‘being’, not of ‘what exists’ - a distinction which I think cannot be made in the modern lexicon which generally treats the two as interchangeable. The way in which they can be distinguished in Greek philosophy is central to the essay which you provided.

The point about ‘ontology’ being derived from the first person participle of the Greek ‘to be’ is that it draws attention to the fact that ontology is concerned with ‘the nature of being’ rather than with ‘what kinds of things exist’ - as is illustrated by the passage I provided above: ‘This intrinsically stable and lasting character of Being in Greek -­ - which makes it [Being] so appropriate as the object of knowing and the correlative of truth -- distinguishes it in a radical way from our modern notion of ‘existence’ - which is precisely the point I'm making. Over and out.

first person participle — Wayfarer

This is literally not a thing. It's gobbledegook. I'd be 'over and out' too if I was caught out making nonsense phrases up.

That is, that they're both empty - almost empty - concepts. — tim wood

Empty, in that neither has a specific object of their own by which they are identified. There are no schemata for the concept of ontology nor metaphysics. But being empty doesn’t make the concepts meaningless, for they may still stand as subsets of rational methods.

Post-Wolff, 1730, and pre-Quine, 1951,:
Metaphysics: the critical doctrine for the study of the principles of reason a priori;
Ontology: the dogmatic doctrine for the study of that which reason treats a posteriori.

The view from this armchair.....

greed, but temporal existence seems neither strictly an ontological nor metaphysical predicate. If time, then time-when, or age, or lots of things, and then we're well out of "most general." — tim wood

Why do you think it must be "most general"? If to be is to be a particular, then what defines being is what differentiates a being from others, not the things that it has in common with others. Therefore "being" would be defined by particularity, not "most general".

That is, to be and to be present in time seem not quite the same thing. — tim wood

Sure, to exist and to be present are not exactly the same thing. But this was your mistake, in the op when you assumed existence to be a predicate. You said: "So we can say of something that exists, that it is." By allowing only the present tense of "to be", you've reduced being, to being at the present, by excluding the past and future. So in your emphasis on the present, with "is", you've forced temporality into the concept. By your use of "is", you exclude "has been", or "will be", from the concept, as non essential aspects, reducing the generality with temporal restrictions only, making being a temporal concept. Therefore it is your presentation which has made "being" a temporal concept.

Further, we have the distinction which wayfarer points to of different persons, It "is", he/she "is", and I "am", which gives the first person a unique form. Wayfarer may be inclined to dwell on that first person perspective because it gives one a unique, and perhaps the only true representation of what it means to be present in time. It may do this by giving a true perspective of simultaneity, and removing the need to relate one thing to another as described in relativity theory, because the internal parts of a person are already united in being.

I think you ought to notice though, that to be is a verb, and therefore signifies an activity, not a thing. The reason why it is considered by people like you, to be a predicate, is that the logic of our grammar necessitates that if there is an activity, there must be something engaged in that activity. So before you even proceed down this road, you ought to be wary that this is a logic which is based in dualism. If "I am" means that there is a subject and predicate, referring to a thing, and the activity which the thing is engaged in, then we have a dualist separation, and dualist premise, from the outset.

That is the issue with making "being" a verb, a predicate. It's a dualist premise and therefore you cannot escape dualism. Another approach is to make "being" a noun. In this sense we talk about beings, and what it mean to be a thing called "a being", rather than what it means to be. I warn you though, that this approach is very confusing and fraught with ambiguity because we begin with no separation or distinction between what is passive and what is active. "Being", referring to a noun "a being", might refer to a thing which "is" (meaning engaged in activity, and changing), or it might refer to an inertial state. .

It may strike those that read through the posts so far - and in my opinion most are worth reading, especially Streetlight's link, here:

https://orb.binghamton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=sagp

- that there is no settled view on the modern meanings of ontology and metaphysics. As to ontology it's even suggested there are different kinds, as species being members of different genera.

A very brief recap:

Philosophim: useless and outdated terms.

Streetlight: refers to entities we commit to being.

Apo: ontology, what is. Metaphysics the "overarching discipline" discipline that comprises epistemology and ontology.

Pfhorrest: useless, confusing. And, "I think of ontology in turn as being about the objects of reality, the things that are real, in contrast to the methods of knowledge, about our subjective access to those objects.

Wayfarer: archaic because of evolution of science to qualitative and quantitative analysis
and
& Streetlight: on the Greek sense of "I am," "being," and "to be." the link noted above.

Sophisticat: reference to many uses of the words in print.

180: ".. a comprehensive account of the most general features of theory, or what constitutes a fundamental explanation of any possible world; the study of possible worlds necessarily presupposed by theorizing as such." And referencing Streetlight,"Metaphysics I think is best thought of in terms of explicating the status of those commitments. So traditionally, metaphysics had to do with the study of necessary beings, aligned with the temporality of eternity. In which case you're dealing with questions of modality and temporality. A different metaphysics might yield a different conception of both, so that one relaxes the commitment to necessity and pays more attention to contingency and the so-called sublunary aspects of 'becoming' and so on.... Condensed, one can say that if ontology deals with 'what', metaphysics deals with 'how.'

Mww: "Metaphysics: the critical doctrine for the study of the principles of reason a priori;
Ontology: the dogmatic doctrine for the study of that which reason treats a posteriori.

------------------------

Science has been described as organized thinking about a determinate subject matter. Unless I missed it, no one here has called either ontology or metaphysics a science. But they could be the attempt to think in an organized manner about an indeterminate subject matter - does that even make sense? It does if they're an attempt to think in an organized manner about the thinking that different people have done at different times. That is, to set about determining certain facts about what those people thought, namely, and at least to start, the whats and hows of that thinking.

And I find this hinted at in the above. To flesh it out, it has to do with the axioms and presuppositions that people have held, and to be sure, hold, because people do have axioms and presuppositions in their thinking. And to push this investigation as deep as possible. This an historical science of assembling facts about people's thinking. Which in a substantial way is what Streetlight's link above is about: the meaning of being to an ancient Greek, and how that differs from modern thinking on the same topic.

Unless I missed it, no one here has called either ontology or metaphysics a science — tim wood

“Science” has had different shades of meaning over history. It used the be used in a broad sense as any field of knowledge. Today it retains a little of that sense still, but increasingly means the narrower concept of a physical, natural, empirical science. Metaphysics and ontology are definitely not the latter, but are still the former.

Ontology = pragmatism? = that which can be proven.

Metaphysics = that which can not necessarily be proven here.

Science = applied ontology/pragmatism?

Thoughts?

Unless I missed it, no one here has called either ontology or metaphysics a science. — tim wood

I don’t see how science is even possible without metaphysics.

Metaphysics is simply that attitude of mind that is willing to seek for an overarching rational principle which could unify reality. It is the start of the search for the general causes of being. And so the origins of the break with animism, mysticism, and other unscientific “explanations” for what the world is, and why it is that way.

Science is applied metaphysics in my book. The underlying assumption - that reality has a logically comprehensible structure - is the same. What has developed over time is an epistemology to fit. And that is pragmatism.

The theory side of science is free to be even more speculative as it is accepted “everything is just a model”. And that open mindedness is justified by the rigour then applied to the business of inductive confirmation or empirical test.

I can see that “metaphysics” became a term adopted by many crackpots as academic cover for their fringe work. But equally, science is also overtaken by a Scientism that rather forgets that science only does offer models of reality. There is bad on both sides.

However it is a simple fact of human history that science is an expression of the metaphysical quest for a rational unifying understanding of reality.

Metaphysics is simply that attitude of mind that is willing to seek for an overarching rational principle — apokrisis

You begin to see the problem here? Earlier, metaphysics just was an overarching discipline that comprises epistemology and ontology. Now it's an attitude of mind that seeks an overarching principle.

Let's suppose I want to be a metaphysician and come to you for advice on exactly what I must do to be a metaphysician. What, exactly, do you say?

And so the origins of the break with animism, mysticism, and other unscientific “explanations” for what the world is, and why it is that way. — apokrisis

I don't agree that the Greek philosophers 'broke with mysticism'. Parmenides, Animaxander, Plato, and many of the other seminal figures of Greek philosophy were mystics. 'Mystic' was originally defined as 'one initiated into the mystery schools' which were religious cults of ancient Greece including Orphism and others which are lost to history. And many of the fundamental ideas of Greek philosophy, such as arche and 'the demiurge', were later incorporated by Christian theology. Indeed it is said that Greek philosophy provided Christian theology with its philosophical superstructure, and it is clearly visible in Western philosophical thought up until the German idealists (and also in C S Peirce and the other 19th C American philosophers.)

It was the attempt to ground philosophy in science in the Enlightenment which is at the basis of the hostility towards metaphysics. That is why this attitude is associated with positivism, which originated with Auguste Comte, founder of 'the social sciences'. It is conveniently forgotten that classical metaphysics was a thoroughly critical philosophy, grounded in centuries of reflection on the nature of knowledge. During the advent of modernity, that was all swept aside in the effort to see the world unimpeded by what were thought to be archaic modes of thought ('commit it to the flames!'). And that gives rise to what Wittgenstein has described - 'At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

So people stop short at natural laws as something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.'

And as of the 'rational unifying understanding of reality' - well, good luck with that, in a time when the 'many worlds interpretation' is holding sway amongst large sections of the secular intelligentsia.

You begin to see the problem here? Earlier, metaphysics just was an overarching discipline that comprises epistemology and ontology. Now it's an attitude of mind that seeks an overarching principle.

Let's suppose I want to be a metaphysician and come to you for advice on exactly what I must do to be a metaphysician. What, exactly, do you say? — tim wood

I don’t see a problem at all. But maybe that’s just because I don’t take a rigid approach to classificatory systems. My constraints based thinking is as happy with looser as it is with tighter definitions. That is simply pragmatism in action.

So you tell me you want to be a metaphysician? I would have to start asking some practical question to discover what you might mean. Do you want a paid career? Did you hope to be a philosophy professor? Did you mean as in what gets taught in an academic class, or found in that section of an academic book shelf?

Maybe then I discover you are a scientist wanting to know what all the fuss is about. Or an amateur wanting to “join the gang”.

You would expect to get an answer that was more general or more specific, more loose or more tight, according to your own needs - that may themselves be either vaguer or more certain.

So my point was that - in an academic setting - metaphysics is understood to be that general thing of a philosophical inquiry into the nature of reality. It is then normal to divide that into epistemology and ontology as the sub disciplines.

Then stepping back to talk about metaphysics and its relation to science - science being a separate academic department these days - and I would want to emphasise how the “real metaphysics” now takes place in the theoretical arms of the sciences.

If you want to study the history of the field, join the philosophy department. If you want to engage with cutting edge ontology, you have to have a high level science training to be in the game. (Or sign up for continental philosophy where you can noodle away opaquely and earn a crust perhaps)

I don't agree that the Greek philosophers 'broke with mysticism'. — Wayfarer

That is why I said they were the origin. The breaking is still an ongoing progress.

It was the attempt to ground philosophy in science in the Enlightenment which is at the basis of the hostility towards metaphysics. — Wayfarer

Yep. And it was a useful division. Atomism and reductionism produced rapid advance in a particular direction.

Holism went on the back burner. Idealism emerged in more defined terms as the “other” of scientific “commonsensicalism”.

It’s all labels. Social boundary marking. The best thinkers don’t let themselves be limited by the name calling.

I see metaphysics as the investigation of what we can, with logical consistency and coherency, imagine about the structure of what we think of as "the world". Ontology would then be the investigation of what kinds of entities we can imagine as actual existents that, along with their relations and attributes, constitute that conceived world.

So, for me metaphysics is a kind of logically constrained poetry. There could be no such thing as a metaphysical proposition, because its terms are ultimately indeterminate. The following passage from
Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein by P.M.S. Hacker, sums it up nicely:

"A venerable tradition in philosophy conceived of the goal of the subject as the attainment of knowledge about the essential, metaphysical, nature of the world. It would clarify the nature of mind, the essence of matter, the ontological status of number, and so on. This Wittgenstein held to be incoherent. An attempt to describe the essence of things will unavoidably violate the bounds of sense, misuse language, and produce nonsense. For essences would have to be expressed by the illegitimate
use of formal concepts in the role of material (genuine) concepts.Thus, for example, that A is or is not an object cannot be said because 'object' is a formal concept. In a logically perspicuous notation it will
be evident that formal concepts are expressed by variables not by predicates or function-names. It will be visible that expressions such as 'is an object', 'is a property', or 'is a number' cannot be used to form a genuine proposition."

I think this is not inconsistent with his later philosophy, where he would allow that metaphysical discourse is coherent insofar as it is not a set of propositions, but merely one among many other "language games".

And I find this hinted at in the above. To flesh it out, it has to do with the axioms and presuppositions that people have held, and to be sure, hold, because people do have axioms and presuppositions in their thinking. And to push this investigation as deep as possible. This an historical science of assembling facts about people's thinking. Which in a substantial way is what Streetlight's link above is about: the meaning of being to an ancient Greek, and how that differs from modern thinking on the same topic. — tim wood

It's easy to talk about such "presuppositions", but the question is really what these things are. What exactly are you referring to with this? Are these supposed presuppositions numbers? Are they intuitions of space and time, are they some sort of bedrock beliefs? See, metaphysicians are prone to assuming the existence of such presuppositions, and talking about them as if they are some sort of real things which can be talked about. But any attempt to describe what they actually are is pure speculation. So, such discussion winds up being an attempt to justify the claimed existence of such presuppositions through the means of pointing to proposed examples. But an example given here and now, cannot replicate what was thought at a prior time.. Therefore you really cannot call this a matter of "assembling facts about people's thinking". It's a matter of speculating about people's thinking. No degree of studying the axioms and principles which people apply can give us the facts about people's thinking.

However,

when Wittgenstein risked his life in battle day after day (in WWI) ...his experience of war had made him a different man to the one whom Russell had met in 1911.

The scope of the Tractatus, too, had broadened: it was no longer just about the possibility of language being logically and pictorially connected to the world. Wittgenstein had begun to feel that logic and what he strangely called ‘mysticism’ sprang from the same root. This explains the second big idea in the Tractatus – which the logical positivists ignored: the thought of there being an unutterable kind of truth that ‘makes itself manifest’. Hence the key paragraph 6.522 in the Tractatus:

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification.

Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:

“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism Stuart Greenstreet, Philosophy Now.

I think it’s quite arguable that Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics was basically Protestant in orientation: not that there wasn’t a dimension of truth which metaphysics attempts to describe, but that this is beyond description; not that there is ‘nothing there’, but that ‘words fail’. Apophatic, not positivist.

I think it’s quite arguable that Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics was basically Protestant in orientation: not that there wasn’t a dimension of truth which metaphysics attempts to describe, but that this is beyond description; not that there is ‘nothing there’, but that ‘words fail’. Apophatic, not positivist. — Wayfarer

Sure, I haven't argued otherwise. Wittgenstein thinks there are ethical, aesthetical and spiritual dimensions of human life about which nothing can be said (propositionally as opposed to poetically at least). You always seem to be trying to say something about the spiritual dimension beyond that, which makes you seem well at odds with Wittgenstein.

At odds with the positivist interpretation of Wittgenstein.

There is no Positivist interpretation of Wittgenstein. Any scholar worth his salt knows that W distanced himself from the Logical Positivists.

Maybe. But you can see how this can easily be interpreted by positivism.

An attempt to describe the essence of things will unavoidably violate the bounds of sense, misuse language, and produce nonsense. — Janus

And in fact, I don't see why the attempt to describe 'the essence of things' must indeed violate 'the bounds of sense'. Aristotle, after all, arguably was the father of the science of taxonomy, by which species are categorised. (I have long had a copy of The Lagoon, subtitled ‘how Aristotle invented science’, ordered from Amazon after a discussion on this very forum, which I really, truly, this time, am about to read.)

I think the notion of ‘essence’ as ‘that which makes a being what it truly is’, is perfectly intelligible. In fact, it’s where the notion of ‘intelligibility’ originated.

Wayfarer: archaic because of evolution of science to qualitative and quantitative analysis — tim wood

Quantitative analysis - mathematical reductionism. Galileo replaced ‘essences’ and ‘substances’ with the ‘primary attributes of bodies’. Not that this was a bad thing! Aristotelianism was by this stage ossified dogma. It was an utterly essential breakthrough by Galileo, which laid the groundwork for so much of modern science. But it had philosophical consequences. This is where Husserl’s critique is worth understanding.

Anecdote: one of my very first uni classes was the well-known Alan Chalmer’s class, ‘what is this thing called “science?” ‘ He told the story of how a group of monks were debating how many teeth a horse had. They all scurried off to the library to consult The Philosopher, only to find that he didn’t say. In which case, they all concluded, it probably wasn’t worth knowing anyway! Except, that is, for one monk, who said, ‘why don’t we go and look in a horses’ mouth?’ For which he was roundly ridiculed.

It's easy to talk about such "presuppositions", but the question is really what these things are. — Metaphysician Undercover

They are metaphorically to thinking what a brick or a 2x4 is to a builder. I say metaphorically because there's a big difference. Bricks and 2x4s are things available in standard sizes - and custom. You can go to a store and buy them. Presuppositions are not things, you are the source of your own,

What a presupposition is, is a piece of thinking that you presuppose. Example: you take commuter rail to work every day. You receive notice of a change of schedule. You then go to the station at the new time. You presuppose your train will be there at the new time. But also you presuppose there is a train, a station, train tracks, and that no one moved them over night. And you have good reason for all of these presuppositions, but presuppositions they are. As to "pure speculation" about them, people who are alive can be asked about theirs, and of people no longer alive, they leave evidence. Or is it "pure speculation" on my part that you have but one and not three noses?

But before you waste your time on presuppositions, I know from previous posts of yours that you a) have opinions about them, b) you don't anything about them, and c) you have disdained doing any research on them, being persuaded you know it all already. Until and unless you do a little research, you're a waste of time on this topic.

And in fact, I don't see why the attempt to describe 'the essence of things' must indeed violate 'the bounds of sense'. Aristotle, after all, arguably was the father of the science of taxonomy, by which species are categorised. — Wayfarer

The idea of essence is the idea of something absolutely unique and determinate. It is like identity; a purely formal concept. Concrete concepts, such as tree, rock or dog, are much looser; that's why Wittgenstein, rejecting the usefulness of the idea of essence due to its simultaneous illusion of absolute determinacy and impossibility of determination, spoke of categorizing things in terms of "family resemblances".

You speak of "describing the essence of things" but all that can be described are sets of characteristics, and these sets are never complete or perfect, but nonetheless enable things to be defined in terms of what they are not in the context of comparison with other things, more than what they are in any so-called absolute sense.

I think the notion of ‘essence’ as ‘that which makes a being what it truly is’, is perfectly intelligible. In fact, it’s where the notion of ‘intelligibility’ originated. — Wayfarer

Yes, it's an idea we have, no doubt; but if you imagine it to be anything more than a linguistically originated idea then you are committing the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness', the sin (in the sense of "missing the mark") of reification.

I also doubt that is where the idea of intelligibility originated; things are not understood in terms of essences, but in terms of differences and resemblances of their sensible characteristics. The idea that something is intelligible is simply the idea that it can be understood; which begins with its being able to be cognized and re-cognized.

To me clinging to the chimerical idea of essences is like lurching at phantoms.

Ontology comes from the Greek ῶν (on), being, and λόγος (logos), knowledge. — tim wood

Well, there's part of the problem - translating logos as knowledge.

Metaphysics can be divided in a reasonably direct fashion into two question: what things exist, and what it is to exist. Cosmology sets out what exists, ontology, what it is to exist.

Cosmology lends itself to empiricism - we can develop a decent narrative by looking around.

Ontology relates more to logic and grammar, looking into the way we use words like "exist", "being" and so on.

SO the "logos" woudl be better understood as discussion rather than knowledge: talk about being; in contrast to discussion about the world, cosmology.

Of course, the two are not distinct.