Thing, form, compactness: T. Garcia’s ontology and its heuristic potential for the philosophy of science and technology

The study aims to substantiate the heuristic potential of Tristan Garcia’s formal ontology for addressing problems in the philosophy of science and technology. The work provides a comparative analysis of the philosopher’s key concepts – thing, form, content, ontological inferiority, and compactness – in relation to classical and contemporary metaphysical approaches. At the ontological level, the study substantiates the universal and egalitarian status of the thing, which exists independently of human perception. Within this framework, the form – content dichotomy describes the identity of objects without recourse to substantialism, while the principle of compactness asserts the inseparable connection between a thing’s essence and its spatiotemporal position. The article demonstrates the applicability of formal ontology to problems in the philosophy of science, including the status of scientific objects and the reinterpretation of the problem of induction through the field of intensities, as well as to problems in the philosophy of technology, such as the individuation of technical devices, the digital environment, and a non-anthropocentric ethics of artificial intelligence. The study identifies fundamental limitations of this approach, including the lack of an operational definition of intensity and the problem of the historical variability of the form of scientific objects. The scientific novelty lies in systematizing the principles of T. Garcia’s post-correlationist metaphysics as a basis for overcoming anthropocentrism and rethinking the fundamental categories of scientific and technological cognition. The study demonstrates that Garcia’s formal ontology possesses considerable heuristic potential for the philosophy of science and technology, but requires further critical reflection and operational adaptation.