Effective January, 2017, at this link are found papers that come under the general heading: What is the world? The word world has a variety of interpretations. From an individual perspective, it is “everything not me”. From a community perspective, it is “everything not us”. Here, it is best interpreted as the inclusive term for all physical existence. Given this, such words as nature, noumena, reality, and universe, can be used as substitutes where appropriate. If one goes to the being of nature as substance, one enters such fields as particle physics, chemistry, mineralogy, biology, geology and the like. If one goes to the being of nature as essence, one enters the field held by ontology in its traditional sense.
