Since its first edition in 1993 the objective of the International Ontology Congress (IOC) has been to assess the situation of the key questions of fundamental philosophy contemplated in the light of contemporary reflection. It follows from this that its Permanent International Scientific Committee includes distinguished figures of contemporary science and art alongside philosophers. The editions of the Congress have been held with the sponsorship of the UNESCO.
The III and IV editions of the IOC concentrated on the concept of Physis. From the emergence of the concept in presocratic texts to the subversion that Quantum Mechanics (and specifically theorising such as Bell’s Theorem) has meant for our representations of Physis, without forgetting the treatment of the concept in the physics of Aristotle, all angles were considered.
The V edition (held in October 2002) examined the concept of the living, which without ever abandoning the historical perspective was once again considered from the perspective of fascinating contemporary debates. Biology played the part of an architectural discipline, but was also enriched with approaches from linguistics, semiotics, psychology, chemistry, physics itself, and naturally ethics and aesthetics, understood beneath the prism of a radical questioning of Kantian order (is there or is there not a horizon of ends which, within the living, singles out “transcendentally” what is human?)
In the VI edition of the IOC the organisers proposed to extend the reflection initiated in the previous one and also to make the leap to the consideration of the problems with the intersection of biology and linguistics; hence the title From the Gene to Language: the state of the matter. The president of honour of the congress was Hilary Putnam.
The title of the VII edition was From the Platonic Cave to Internet: what is Real and what is Virtual. It was sponsored by the UNESCO and the president of honour was John Searle. Our perceptions, aesthetic or ethical judgements, and our cognitive efforts have never been so influenced by information (conveyed by digits) with two-dimensional plasmation as in our time. Digital modelling has permitted extraordinary advances, for example, in the field of medicine. It has been said that even purely theoretical reflection (whether scientific or philosophical) would today be impossible de facto without digital paraphernalia. Others object to this and maintain that Einstein, Niels Böhr, and even John Bell are the cause rather than the result of technological sophistication, and that science worthy of the name continues to respond to eternal objectives of intelligibility, for which technology must continue to be merely an instrument. The subject of what is real and what is virtual has various sides that involve from mathematical simulation to cybernetics, molecular biology, and neurobiology, without forgetting cognitive psychology, etc. Another prominent aspect is that of contemporary physics, in which the term "virtual" is applied to phenomena that violate the traditional laws of conservation when this violation is undetectable in a direct manner. The concept of what is "virtual" in art, and particularly in music, was not neglected either. The question of its universality is an obsession in many disciplines. Musicologists do not lose heart when it comes to affirm the anthropological importance of music because some people are not receptive to musical manifestations to which exclusivity has been abusively attributed.
The President of Honour of the VIII Congress, which once again was sponsored by the UNESCO, was the distinguished philosopher and physicist A. Grünbaum. Its subject was “Apeiron: the problem of infinity from Greek thought to contemporary science”. Personalities from the world of mathematics, cosmology, and other disciplines attended from many different countries to assess the situation in sessions held in San Sebastián and Barcelona. At the Casa Asia in Barcelona and under the auspices of this institution, which is dependent on the Spanish Foreign Office, a special seminar entitled “Mathematical infinity in a Chinese context” was held with mathematicians and philosophers with connections with the Peking Science Academy under the direction of Professor J. Dauben of the City University of New York (CUNY) and the Peking Science Academy itself. The success of the participation of the public in this seminar has encouraged the organisers in their decision (which was not made recently) to strengthen links with Asian philosophical and scientific institutions.
