Ontology and cosmology explore how different communities understand existence, reality and the qualities of the worlds they inhabit.
Ontology asks what kinds of beings and relationships are understood to exist, while cosmology considers how those beings and relationships fit within a wider account of the universe. Together, they examine ideas about humans, animals, plants, ancestors, spirits, landscapes and other forms of existence, as well as concepts of time, space, causality and responsibility. Rather than assuming that these categories have the same meaning everywhere, this enquiry considers how particular cultures develop coherent understandings of what the world is, how it came to be, and how its inhabitants ought to live within it.
Its intellectual traditions range from classical accounts of being and the cosmos through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, to the anthropological work of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Eduardo Kohn. Concepts such as animism, perspectivism, multinaturalism and ontological pluralism have opened challenging debates about whether different peoples simply interpret one shared reality differently, or participate in worlds constituted through different relationships. These perspectives offer a powerful way of examining the assumptions beneath our own ideas of nature, culture, knowledge and existence.
This field brings philosophy into dialogue with anthropology, ecology, religious studies, phenomenology and Indigenous scholarship. It can illuminate the assumptions underlying apparently practical relationships with land and other beings, revealing that ideas about resource use, stewardship or conservation are often connected to much deeper understandings of personhood, reciprocity and obligation. Contemporary work is particularly interested in what happens when contrasting worldviews encounter one another, and whether environmental challenges can be approached without reducing different understandings of reality to competing versions of the same Western categories.
Ontology matters because beneath our explicit beliefs are assumptions about what exists, what matters and what kinds of beings we share the world with. People routinely make ontological distinctions without naming them: between living and non-living things, humans and animals, nature and culture, objects and subjects, resources and relationships. These assumptions influence how we build institutions, manage land, design economies and decide what deserves protection. They are often experienced simply as common sense, making them particularly powerful and difficult to see.
Studying ontology allows us to examine these underlying assumptions and encounter the possibility that other people and cultures organise reality differently. It does not require accepting every alternative account as equally valid, but encourages us to become more conscious of the conceptual foundations from which our actions arise. This matters for sustainability because many environmental problems are not simply failures of technical knowledge; they also arise from particular ways of defining our relationship with the world. Examining ontology can therefore open space for different relationships with Land and fellow beings—and, ultimately, for different ways of organising everyday life around care, responsibility, reciprocity and coexistence.