Ontology

=== Body and environment, questioning the meaning of being ===
Schools of [[metaphysical subjectivism|subjectivism]], [[metaphysical objectivism|objectivism]], and [[relativism]] existed at various times in the 20th century, and the [[postmodernism|postmodernists]] and [[embodied philosophy|body philosophers]] tried to reframe all these questions in terms of bodies taking some specific [[philosophy of action|action]] in an environment. This relied to a great degree on insights derived from scientific research into animals taking instinctive action in natural and artificial settings—as studied by [[biology]], [[ecology]],<ref>{{Cite web |last=Smith |first=Barry |date=2001 |title=Objects and their environments: From Aristotle to ecological ontology |url=https://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/napflion.pdf |access-date=2023-11-26 |language=en}}</ref> and [[cognitive science]].{{Citation needed|date=January 2012}}

The processes by which bodies related to environments became of great concern, and the idea of [[being]] itself became difficult to define. What did people mean when they said "A is B", "A must be B", "A was B"...? Some linguists advocated dropping the verb "to be" from the English language, leaving "[[E-Prime|E&nbsp;Prime]]", supposedly less prone to bad abstractions. Others, mostly philosophers, tried to dig into the word and its usage. [[Martin Heidegger]] distinguished ''human being'' as ''existence'' from the being of things in the world. Heidegger proposed that our way of being human and the way the world is for us are cast historically through a fundamental ontological questioning. These fundamental ontological categories provide the basis for communication in an age: a horizon of unspoken and seemingly unquestionable background meanings, such as human beings understood unquestioningly as subjects and other entities understood unquestioningly as objects. Because these basic ontological meanings both generate, and are regenerated in everyday interactions, the locus of our way of being in a historical epoch is the communicative event of language in use.<ref name="Hyde">Hyde, R. Bruce. "Listening Authentically: A Heideggerian Perspective on Interpersonal Communication". In ''Interpretive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication'', edited by Kathryn Carter and Mick Presnell. State University of New York Press, 1994. {{ISBN|0791418472}}.</ref> For Heidegger, however, communication in the ''first'' place is not among human beings, but language itself shapes up in response to questioning (the inexhaustible meaning of) being.<ref>Heidegger, Martin. 1971 [1959]. ''On the Way to Language.'' New York: Harper & Row.

''original'': 1959. ''Unterwegs zur Sprache'' Neske. [[Pfullingen]].</ref> Even the focus of traditional ontology on the 'whatness' or ''quidditas'' of beings in their substantial, standing presence can be shifted to pose the question of the 'whoness' of human being itself.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Eldred |first=Michael |title=Social ontology: recasting political philosophy through a phenomenology of whoness |date=2008 |publisher=Ontos Verl |isbn=978-3-938793-78-7 |location=Frankfurt |pages=xiv, 688 |url=http://www.arte-fact.org/sclontlg.html}}</ref>