No matter from what direction the thinker is proceeding along the "philosophical road", he must cross the bridge known as "the basic ques- tion of philosophy". As he does so he must, whether he likes it or not, decide on which side of the river of philosophical thought he will re- main – the materialist or the idealist side. But he may find himself in mid-stream, in the position of dualism, that is to say, recognition of two equal and independent substances in the universe – material and spiritu- al. The basic question of philosophy is that of the relationship of think-

ing to being. It presupposes acknowledgement of the existence of an objective, i.e., independent of human consciousness, reality and a sub- jective, spiritual reality – representations, thoughts, ideas – and a certain relationship between them. Which comes first – matter or conscious- ness? Which generates which? Does matter at a certain stage of devel- opment generate its finest flower – the reason? Or does the world spirit create the material world? Or perhaps they have coexisted eternally as equal substances in their own right and are in some way interacting?

Such is the first aspect of the basic question of philosophy. Its second aspect comes down to the following. Can man and mankind in general know the objective laws of the world by the power of their own con- sciousness? Or is the world unknowable? In examining the first aspect implied in the basic question of philosophy the thinker inevitably finds himself in one of two camps, materialism or idealism, while in examin- ing the second aspect of the question he takes a stand either in favour of the fundamental possibility of knowing the world or in favour of agnos- ticism, that is, denial of this possibility.

Why is the question of the relation of thinking to being – a seemingly very abstract question – considered to be the basic philosophical ques- tion? Because from the nature of the answer we give, as from the source of a great river, there flow not only directly contrasting interpretations of all other philosophical problems but also the general theoretical, world-view questions posed by any science, moral phenomena, stand- ards of law and responsibility, phenomena of art, political events, prob- lems of education, and so on.

We cannot consider any philosophical question unless we first solve the basic question of philosophy. To illustrate, let us take the example of the concept of causality. Materialism presumes that this concept reflects an objective, i.e., independent of human consciousness, process of gen- eration of some phenomena by others. But Hume, for example, denied the existence of causality in nature. He believed that it was habit that taught people to see certain phenomena as the causes of others, for in- stance, the blow of an axe and the falling of a tree. We have indeed be- come accustomed to see the result follow the action that causes it. But this habit is based on the continuous consideration of the objective con- nection of phenomena and did not arise by itself. According to the mate- rialist principle, all authentically proved concepts, categories, proposi- tions, inferences, laws and theories have a substantially objective char- acter and do not depend on the whim of man. Idealism, on the other

hand, is inclined to regard them merely as mental constructions. For ex- ample, the materialist scholar of literature studying the work of Shake- speare begins by sorting out what objective social conditions predeter- mined the character and inspiration of the dramatist's work. The ideal- ists, on the other hand, are inclined to attribute his work to the depth of the individual spirit of this genius and ignore the social conditions in which he lived and wrote. If one takes the moral sphere, it is immediate- ly obvious how contrasting the solutions to the basic question of philos- ophy may be. Are man's moral qualities innate or given by God, or are they formed by life, by upbringing. As applied to history, the basic question of philosophy appears as a relationship between social being and social consciousness. On how this relationship is interpreted de- pends the answer to the question: what determines man's destiny, what guides history – ideas, the rational powers of historic individuals, or the material production carried on by the people of a given society and the economic relationships that arise from this process. Consequently, the basic question of philosophy is not simply the question of the relation between thinking and being in general, but more specifically, that of the relation between social consciousness and social being, that is to say, the objective relations between people formed on the basis of their pro- duction of material goods. The materialist understanding of the basic question of philosophy as applied to history is expressed fully and simp- ly: social being ultimately determines social consciousness and social consciousness, derivatively, has an active influence on this being.

Consideration of the basic question shows that the real processes of life from their interpretation in various theories, the material driving forces of society from the ideal motivations, the material interests of people, social groups from their reflections in the mind. Materialism teaches our thinking to see in our mental constructions, in our artistic, political and other ideas and images the objective content determined by the external world, by life. Idealism, on the other hand, hypertrophies the spiritual principle, treats it as absolute. In politics, for example, this attitude may have dangerous consequences for the people; idealism sometimes results in political adventurism. This happens when a politi- cian ignores the objective laws of history, the will of the masses, the existing economic relations, and tries by the power of his own volition to impose his own ideas, which run counter to the real, law-governed current of events.

Materialism understands the world as it is in fact, without attributing to it any supernatural qualities and principles. Explanation of the world from the world itself is the methodological principle of materialism. It maintains that the connections between ideas in people's heads reflect and transform the connections between phenomena in the world. To the extent that people in living their lives cannot help considering the fact of the objective existence of the world, so they act as materialists: some spontaneously, others consciously, on a philosophical basis. Certain sci- entists sometimes dissociate themselves from materialism while sponta- neously working on its principles. On the other hand, the supporters of philosophically conscious materialism not only consistently advocate such a solution of the basic question of philosophy but also substantiate and uphold it.

Idealism is in general related to the desire to elevate the spirit to the maximum degree. In speaking with such veneration of the spiritual, of the idea, Hegel assumed that even the criminal thought of the evil-doer was greater and more to be marvelled at than all the wonders of the world. In the ordinary sense idealism is associated with remoteness from earthly interests, constant immersion in pure thought, and dedication to unrealisable dreams. Such "practical idealism" is contrasted to "practical materialism", which its opponents, wishing to belittle it, present as a greedy desire for material goods, avarice, acquisitiveness, and so on.

Idealism is divided into two basic forms: objective and subjective. The objective idealists, beginning from the ancients and ending with those of the present day, recognise the existence of a real world outside man, but believe that the world is based on reason, that it is ruled by certain omnipotent ideas which guide everything. Consciousness is hy- pertrophied, separated from man, from matter, and converted into a su- pra-individual, all-embracing reality. Reality is considered to be rational and the reason is interpreted as the substance, the basis of the universe. All things and processes are thus spiritualised. Such a notion of the su- perhuman and supernatural spiritual essence, the world reason, the world will, the absolute idea, is essentially a religious notion. For exam- ple, in Hegel the "absolute idea" is quite often called simply god, an im- personal, objective, logical process, while nature and the history of soci- ety are its guided other-being. Reason is the soul of the world. It resides in the universe, it is its immanent essence.

From the standpoint of subjective idealism it is only through inade- quate knowledge that we take the world as we see it to be the actually

existing world. According to this conception, the world does not exist apart from us, apart from our sense perceptions: to exist is to exist in perception! And what we consider to be different from our sensations and existing apart from them is composed of the diversity of our subjec- tive sensuality: colour, sound, forms and other qualities are only sensa- tions and sets of such sensations form things. This implies that the world is, so to speak, woven out of the same subjective material of which hu- man dreams are composed.

To the subjective idealists it appears that our efforts to reach beyond consciousness are futile and it is therefore impossible to acknowledge the existence of any external world that is independent of consciousness. It is a fact that we know the world only as it is given to man, to the ex- tent to which it is reflected in our consciousness through sensations. But this certainly does not mean that the world when reflected in conscious- ness somehow dissolves in it like sugar in water. The reader may legiti- mately ask: have there really been any philosophers who maintain such a strange philosophy as subjective idealism, a philosophy that for so many centuries was subjected not merely to criticism but to sarcastic ridicule? On the ordinary empirical level, surely it is only madmen, and only a few of them, who can deny the independent existence of the world. In practice, the subjective idealists probably did not behave as if they believed there was no external world. These ideas were strictly re- served for the sphere of theoretical thought.

The objective idealists elevate human thought and its products – con- cepts, ideas and culture in general – to the status of the absolute. In an- cient times people measured their actions according to the unwritten rules of their ancestors that had been retained in the memory and handed down from generation to generation. The individual consciousness grew accustomed to being dominated by certain supra-individual ideas, social standards retained in human memory and in the form of the "social memory", in language. This relative independence of the spiritual life of society was elevated by imagination into something absolutely inde- pendent, into Reason divorced not only from living and thinking people but also from society, from matter in general, so that thinking and its products were elevated to a special spiritual realm, the immanent es- sence of the universe. And this was objective idealism. Its epistemologi- cal roots go down deep into history, when the progress of cognitive ac- tivity and the penetration of reason into the essence of things triggered the process of formation of abstract concepts. The problem arose of re-

lating the universal and the particular, the essence and its manifesta- tions. It was not easy for man to understand how the universal reflected in, for example, the concept of beauty was related to the individual form of its existence in a given individual. A beautiful person lives and dies but the idea of beauty survives him and proves to be indestructible. A wise man departs this life but wisdom, as something universal, common to all wise men who ever lived, live or will live in the future, survives in the system of culture as something existing above the individual.

This universal, reflected in the concepts, came to be identified with the concept itself. The universal features in things and the concept of the universal became merged in the consciousness, forming an objective- idealist alloy, in which the universal was divorced from its individual existence, apart from which it could not exist at all, and acquired the status of an independent essence. Objective idealism begins when the idea of a thing is conceived not as a reflection of the thing but as some- thing eternally existing before the thing, embodied in the thing and de- termining the thing in its structure, properties and relationships and con- tinuing to exist after the destruction of the thing. Thus Pythagoras thought of numbers as independent essences ruling the world, and Plato regarded general concepts as a special realm of pure thought and beauty that had engendered the world of visible reality. The idea of a thing cre- ated by man precedes the existence of the thing itself. The thing in its given form is derived from the aim, the intention of its creator, let us say, a carpenter.

The greater part of the things that surround us are the result of man's creative activity, they are something created by man. The idea of crea- tion has become for man a kind of prism through which he regards the whole world. This idea is so deeply rooted that he does not find it easy to set it aside and think of the world as something not created by any- body and existing eternally. The idea of the eternity of existence contra- dicts all the facts of our life, in which nearly everything is created, one might say, before our very eyes. So the eternal, uncreated existence of the world simply did not fit into people's heads and still does not fit in with many people's thinking. The level of science was very low and this gave rise to the assumption that there must be some universal creator and lord of all things. This idea was strengthened also by the fact that so much in the world was strikingly harmonious and purposeful.

Idealism is linked with religion and, directly or indirectly, provides its theoretical expression and substantiation. Over idealism there always

hovers the idea of a god. Subjective idealism, compelled to be incon- sistent in defending its principles, allows the objective existence of a god. The universal reason of the objective idealists is essentially a philo- sophical pseudonym for god: the supreme reason conceives itself in its creations. At the same time it would be a vulgarisation to identify ideal- ism with religion. Philosophical idealism is not a religion but the road to religion through one of the forms of the complex process of human knowledge. They are different ways of being aware of the world and forming an attitude to it.

As a first approximation, ontology is the study of what there is. Some contest this formulation of what ontology is, so it's only a first approximation. Many classical philosophical problems are problems in ontology: the question whether or not there is a god, or the problem of the existence of universals, etc. These are all problems in ontology in the sense that they deal with whether or not a certain thing, or more broadly entity, exists. But ontology is usually also taken to encompass problems about the most general features and relations of the entities which do exist. There are also a number of classic philosophical prob- lems that are problems in ontology understood this way. For example, the problem of how a universal relates to a particular that has it, or the problem of how an event like John eating a cookie relates to the particu- lars John and the cookie, and the relation of eating, assuming there are events, particulars and relations. These kinds of problems quickly turn into metaphysics more generally, which is the philosophical discipline that encompasses ontology as one of its parts. The borders here are a little fuzzy. But we have at least two parts to the overall philosophical project of ontology: first, say what there is, what exists, what the stuff is reality is made out off, secondly, say what the most general features and relations of these things are.

This way of looking at ontology comes with two sets of problems which leads to the philosophical discipline of ontology being more complex than just answering the above questions. The first set of prob- lems is that it isn't clear how to approach answering these questions. This leads to the debate about ontological commitment. The second set of problems is that it isn't so clear what these questions really are. This leads to the philosophical debate about meta-ontology. One of the trou- bles with ontology is that it not only isn't clear what there is, it also isn't so clear how to settle questions about what there is, at least not for the kinds of things that have traditionally been of special interest to philos-

ophers: numbers, properties, God, etc. Ontology is thus a philosophical discipline that encompasses besides the study of what there is and the study of the general features of what there is also the study of what is involved in settling questions about what there is in general, especially for the philosophically tricky cases.

How we can find out what there is isn't an easy question to answer. It seems simple enough for regular objects that we can perceive with our eyes, like my house keys, but how should we decide it for such things as, say, numbers or properties? One first step to making progress on this question is to see if what we believe already rationally settles this ques- tion. That is to say, given that we have certain beliefs, do these beliefs already bring with them a rational commitment to an answer to such questions as ‗Are there numbers?‘ If our beliefs bring with them a ra- tional commitment to an answer to an ontological question about the existence of certain entities then we can say that we are committed to the existence of these entities. What precisely is required for such a commitment to occur is subject to debate, a debate we will look at mo- mentarily. To find out what one is committed to with a particular set of beliefs, or acceptance of a particular theory of the world, is part of the larger discipline of ontology.

Besides it not being so clear what it is to commit yourself to an an- swer to an ontological question, it also isn't so clear what an ontological question really is, and thus what it is that ontology is supposed to ac- complish. To figure this out is the task of meta-ontology, which strictly speaking is not part of ontology construed narrowly, but the study of what ontology is. However, like most philosophical disciplines, ontolo- gy more broadly construed contains its own meta-study, and thus meta- ontology is part of ontology, more broadly construed. Nonetheless it is helpful to separate it out as a special part of ontology. Many of the phil- osophically most fundamental questions about ontology really are meta- ontological questions. Meta-ontology has not been too popular in the last couple of decades, partly because one meta-ontological view, the one often associated with Quine, has been accepted as the correct one, but this acceptance has been challenged in recent years in a variety of ways. One motivation for the study of meta-ontology is simply the ques- tion of what question ontology aims to answer. Take the case of num- bers, for example. What is the question that we should aim to answer in ontology if we want to find out if there are numbers, that is, if reality contains numbers besides whatever else it is made up from? This way of

putting it suggest an easy answer: ‗Are there numbers?‘ But this ques- tion seems like an easy one to answer. An answer to it is implied, it seems, by trivial mathematics, say that the number 7 is less than the number 8. If the latter, then there is a number which is less than 8, namely 7, and thus there is at least one number. Can ontology be that easy? The study of meta-ontology will have to determine, amongst oth- ers, if ‗Are there numbers?‘ really is the question that the discipline of ontology is supposed to answer, and more generally, what ontology is supposed to do. We will pursue these questions below. As we will see, several philosophers think that ontology is supposed to answer a differ- ent question than what there is, but they often disagree on what that question is.