THE ANCIENT BACKGROUND

Interest in the problems of ontology has been constant throughout the history of systematic thought. Philosophy and empirical science virtually began with a handful of people's tackling some quite abstract metaphysical puzzles, and today, about twenty–five centuries later, philosophers still attack questions closely related to those that have initiated this fascinating enterprise. Although ontology in our era has a much richer content, abounding with a great variety of explanations, a highly subtler terminology and a remarkably deeper grasp of the matters concerned, like the rest of philosophy, it retains many of the fundamental assumptions first made by the Ancient Greeks, intuitively at first, and later explicitly and officially.

The present study concerns the nature of object, change and property. I propose to introduce my discussion of these issues by an informal sketch of the development of some of the earliest attempts made in the same direction. I am interested in looking into the way in which the relevant fundamental problems of ontology and the principal rational attempts to solve them first emerged. My descriptions are not intended to be historically complete (or perhaps even fully accurate), and I will allow myself some freedom of interpretation.

The earliest philosophers were bewildered by the fact of change. It is highly remarkable that they should have picked this one amongst so many unsolved and less abstract problems. In our ordinary waking life we encounter change perpetually, and simply take it for granted. It is through their various attempts to understand and solve the ostensibly paradoxical nature of change that ancient thinkers posed a number of other fundamental questions regarding existence.