The Meaning of Something: Rethinking the Logic and the Unity of the Ontology

This innovative volume investigates the meaning of ’something’ in different recent philosophical traditions in order to rethink the logic and the unity of ontology, without forgetting to compare these views to earlier significative accounts in the history of philosophy. In fact, the revival of interest in ＂something＂ in the 19^th and 20^th centuries as well as in contemporary philosophy can easily be accounted for: it affords the possibility for asking the question: what is there? without engaging in predefined speculative assumptions The issue about ＂something＂ seems to avoid any naive approach to the question about what there is, so that it is treated in two main contemporary philosophical trends: ＂material ontology＂, which aims at taking ＂inventory＂ ofwhat there is, of everything that is; and ＂formal ontology＂, which analyses the structural features of all there is, whatever it is.

The volume advances cutting-edge debates on what is the first et the most general item in ontology, that is to say ＂something＂, because the relevant features of the conceptual core of something are: non-nothingness, otherness. Something means that one being is different from others. The relationality belongs to something.: Therefore, the volume advances cutting-edge debates in phenomenology, analytic philosophy, formal and material ontology, traditional metaphysics.

Fosca Mariani Zini is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tours (CESR, UMR 7323). She studied at the Universities of Milan (Statale) and Paris (Sorbonne, then EHESS). She was Fellow of of the Warburg Institute (London), the Wolfenbüttel Bibliothek, the French School of Rome, and the Humboldt Stiftung and Senior Scholar at Topoi, Freie Universität-Humboldt Universität (Berlin). She has had visiting appointements at several universities. Her research focuses on ancient, medieval and modern philosophy, mostly in the aereas on ontology and argumentation theory.