Lionel Shriver identifies some words and phrases she dislikes here.
I don't disagree with her, but if you really pinned me down to choosing only one word that I would prefer never to see again, I would have to pick "ontological". Try this piece and tell me that you don't begin to dread "ontological" looming ahead for the three hundredth time, yet another Becher's Brook and you stuck in the Grand National of pompous pronouncement where "foreground" has somehow become a verb.
For a while some years ago, techies talked a fair bit about "ontologies", by which I think they meant ways of classifying whatever it was they wished to deal with. Otherwise, I have generally run into "ontology" or "ontological" only in writings on philosophy, where they have settled meanings. The author seems to take "ontological" as meaning "a satisfying or reassuring account of one's purpose". That use would have surprised quite a few philosophers over the last two and a half centuries.
ReplyDeleteThe OED defines ontological as "the argument that God, being defined as the most great or perfect being, must exist, since a God who exists is greater than a God who does not". It is an argument that I can't grasp.
ReplyDeleteThe term was applied to St. Anselm's argument centuries after he lived and wrote. Etienne Gilson writes that the word first crops up about 1650, and that Wolff popularized it in the early 18th Century.
DeleteYou are not alone in finding the ontological argument unsatisfactory.
I feel like I am in an Escher optical illusion when I try to make sense of it.
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