Onto-Med >> Theories >> GFO Part I Basic Principles

Overview

General Formal Ontology (GFO)

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14.1 Entity and Existential Dependency

Entity is the category of everything that exists. We consider the entity level as a philosophical level at which the most general distinctions are considered. These are distinctions of modes of existence and of existential dependency. For many types of entities, their instances existentially depend on other entities. For instance, a time-boundary depends on the chronoid it is a boundary of, or the quality that inheres in a material structure depends on that structure. Various types of dependency relations are discussed in the philosophical literature, see e.g. chapter 9 in (33).