Elements of Institutional Legal Positivism

Abstract

Ontology is usually regarded as a philosophical discipline with the task of representing the major categories of being. The modes of existence as well as the fundamental relations between different categories of objects. In principle it is conceived of as an identifying discipline with the task of characterizing what exists in itself. Nicolai Hartmann, for instance, takes this view ascribing to ontology the tasks of acquiring knowledge of being as being, of defining the different modes of being and of revealing their relations.¹ In this way it is possible to achieve the kind of categorisation of observable objects expressed in Hartmann’s layer-ontology (or, in complete analogy, in Popper’s Three Worlds Theory²). In contrast to these identifying object-metaphysics and to the categorisation of objects I should like to advance a different conception of ontology which emphasises the stipulating character of ontology. The ontological principles and categories are entities which determine the fundamental framework of our world view or of certain disciplines by stipulation. In the spirit of criticism this conception of ontology is based on the view that our cognition and cogitation take place necessarily within a framework of fundamental structures and that the experiential material is shaped, processed and categorized in accordance with this system of fundamental structures. Kant’s tenets accepted these forms as necessarily a priori; by contrast, the — as one might say — neocritical conception postulates the possibility of establishing a variety of frameworks of our thinking and understanding.³