Part of the fascination of Being and Time is that it seeks to weave together so many different strands of thought. But unsurprisingly, its readers also worry that such a work must subject itself to such strain that ultimately it itself must unravel. Key tensions are between the outlooks of three figures: Heidegger the pragmatist, Heidegger the existentialist, and Heidegger the philosopher of being. Seeing how openness to our concerns as a whole is both necessary for authenticity and reveals a unified horizon against which entities with different ways of being show themselves, dissipates these apparent tensions. Recognition of the mediating role played by a conception of the good – that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and Augustine inspired – helps make clear that authenticity is both compatible with the practical embeddedness of our concerns and reveals a form of understanding necessary for ontology to be possible.

In this chapter, I examine arguments that have been or might be used to establish or defend the distinction that Heidegger draws between entities (things that are) and the being of entities (that by virtue of which those things are). I find these arguments for the ontological difference to fail – due largely to the self-concealing nature of being, which makes it difficult to distinguish being from entities. At the same time, I see something positive in these troubles for the ontological difference, that is, they serve as prompts to question the meaning of being.

When writing Being and Time, Heidegger envisaged the project to be more extensive than the text we now have. Only about a third of the material announced in the introduction has been published. Drawing on Heidegger’s retrospective comments, this chapter lays out the philosophical reasons why he abandoned the project. In published writings, Heidegger emphasizes the continuity between Being and Time and later works: the failure of Being and Time was a turn (Kehre) necessary to further advance on the path of thought. Heidegger’s private manuscripts present a more detailed and much more critical picture. In the ‘Running Notes to “Being and Time”’ (GA 82, 3-136), Heidegger rejects several methodological and substantial commitments of the book, including the ambition to answer the question of being and the commitment to temporality as the explanatory paradigm of ontology.

Chapter 7 examines the Fourth Way, which argues from the gradations of being, truth, goodness, and other perfections found in things, to a first cause utmost in being and perfection. After a translation and the premises are given, the chapter explains what assigning a gradation of these terms involves for Aquinas. There is discussion of a key implication of the Five Ways that God is “subsistent being itself,” that God’s essence is God’s existence. Next, there is a discussion of the premise that there is a maximum in every genus which is the cause of all other things in that genus. Thus, there is a maximum in being, truth, and goodness which causes these in all other things. This is God. A closing section discusses the doctrine of continuous creation in Aquinas, that God sustains all else in existence at every moment. There is a look at the contemporary debate over the need for a God to do this, which is termed divine conservation versus existential inertia.

Chapter 5 marks a pivot in the book away from the block universe and towards theology. Here, Paul Tillich’s magnum opus, Systematic Theology is assessed in detail, laying the foundations for further exploration into both Tillich’s work and his theological methodology.

Suggestions of a processual orientation in Collingwood’s thought can be found in certain places in his corpus, but Collingwood is not generally known as a process philosopher. This is likely because the Libellus de Generatione, in which he develops a process-oriented ontology, has long been unavailable and thought lost. While a copy was found and is housed in the Bodleian Library, it was only made publicly available in 2019. This chapter explicates the process ontology developed in the Libellus and contextualizes it in relation to Collingwood’s wider corpus and to early twentieth-century process philosophy. Drawing on Sandra Rosenthal, I argue that Collingwood’s understanding of process is closer to Bergson’s than Whitehead’s, especially in ways that allow for genuine novelty and creation, and in its implications for the metaphysics of time. I then discuss implications of this process ontology for the view of Collingwood as an idealist and for other areas of his philosophy. Finally, I consider whether attributing a processual ontology to Collingwood is in tension with his own view of “metaphysics without ontology.”

In Chapter 10, I discuss the final three chapters of the Itinerarium (chapters 5, 6, and 7). The first two correspond to the third pair of the Seraph’s wings, those above his head, representing the vision of God we get looking “above” our minds to the transcendental properties “Being” (chapter 5) and “Goodness” (chapter 6). To make the contrasting points he wishes to make about the unity and Trinity of God, however, Bonaventure decides he must switch his imagery from the third pair of Seraph wings to the pair of wings on each of the two Cherubim that were said to surround the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple. After these two chapters, Bonaventure adds a short concluding chapter (chapter 7) that corresponds to the image of Christ crucified that St. Francis saw in center of the seraph’s wings. At this stage of the ascent, all intellectual effort must cease and those journeying who wish to ascend must simply rest in the mystery of God’s love.

This chapter shows that the entire intelligible world in Plotinus has a personal nature. Every real being is a person, not an abstract concept or a dead thing. Moreover, those real beings don’t exist in separation, and they are not autonomous individuals, but form a unified, living whole, an organism or, as Plotinus calls it, a city with a soul. The Forms are sacred statues of the gods, which can be seen through their sensible images. In the end, Plotinus coins a neologism to describe this peculiar vision of reality: παμπρόσοωπόν τι, “being-all-faces”. This grand vision gives a deeper meaning to all the earlier metaphors of statues, reflected images, and faces that I have been elucidating in the book. In a deep unity of the intelligible world, to know and love one’s own face or to know and love the face of another is to contemplate all the other faces that participate in the living city that is reality.

This chapter discusses the way the contemplation of Intellect and the Forms is related to the experience of the sensible world. Despite the traditional view that Platonism espouses “two worlds”, Plotinus mocks the idea of the sensible and the intelligible as being actually two separated realms. Rather, for him there is only one world but seen from different perspectives by different cognitive activities of the soul. What happens in noetic contemplation is not that the Forms are seen apart from their sensible images, but that they are seen in and through their images, having become transparent to their essences. Or, when the experience is mature, it is rather that the sensible things are seen in and through their intelligible archetypes. To explain that phenomenon, Plotinus uses the continuum of dimness and clarity, and claims that perception is dim intellection, while intellection is clear perception. The contemplation of the transparency of the sensible to the intelligible gives rise to the experience of “bodies in Intellect” or the profound unity of the two realms, where the entire reality of the sensible is to be found in the intelligible.

This chapter examines the notion of being in the Consolation of Philosophy and contrasts it with modern notions of existence. The notions in the Consolation relevant to this inquiry are those expressed by the verbs esse and exsistere. The chapter argues that the basic notion of exsistere in the Consolation should be understood as “to be manifest,” while the basic notion of esse should be understood as “to be something or other” or “to be intelligible.” Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that the notion of esse in the Consolation differs from typical modern notions of existence in two significant ways. First, unlike modern notions of existence, according to which there are things that do not exist, the notion of esse or being in the Consolation has no contrary. Everything that can be spoken of or thought about “is” in some way. Second, the notion of esse in the Consolation, as in Aristotle, is “said in many ways.” In this it differs from modern notions of existence, which tend to be univocal. The chapter shows that once the notions of exsistere and esse are properly understood, certain arguments in the Consolation that might initially appear confused turn out to be quite clear and highly plausible.

Engaging directly with the question whether Platonic Forms are concepts, David Sedley’s chapter ’Are Platonic Forms Concepts?’ takes its start from the Parmenides 132b–c, where Socrates and Parmenides briefly examine the hypothesis that Forms are ‘thoughts’ (noēmata). Sedley asks what ‘thoughts’ are in that context, and argues that they are not thought contents, but acts of thinking. The chapter offers an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the classical theory of Forms as showcased in the Phaedo, Republic, Parmenides, and Timaeus, in terms that clarify why Plato was bound to reject the hypothesis considered in the Parmenides (132b–c), namely that Forms are thoughts.

A growth point captures the moment of speaking, taking a first-person view. It is thought in language, imbued with mental/social energy, and unpacked into a sentence. It is not a translation of gesture into speech. It is a process of processes. One is the psychological predicate (a notion from Vygotsky), a differentiation of context for what is newsworthy, the growth point’s core meaning – the context reshaped into a field of equivalents to make the differentiation meaningful. The core meaning has dual semiosis – opposite semiotic modes – a global-synthetic gesture and analytics-segmented speech, synchronized and coexpressive of the core. The gesture phases foster the synchronization. Cohesive threads to other growth points (a “catchment”) enrich it. A dialectic provides the growth point’s unpacking – the gesture becoming the thesis, the coexpressive speech the antithesis. Jointly, they create the dialectic synthesis. The dialectic synthesis and the unpacking are the same summoned construction-plus-gesture. The growth point, its processes fulfilled, inhabits the speaker’s being, taking up a position in the world of meaning it has created (conception from Merleau-Ponty).

After an introductory discussion about Mann’s and Heidegger’s direct comments about each other, I explore how Mann and Heidegger are situated with regard to what has been called conservative revolution. Mann not only helped to gain currency for the concept of conservative revolution, but he also defended it against what he considered its right-wing and/or fascist spoilers, before eventually providing a thorough criticism of it in his Doctor Faustus. Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks show that in the 1930s and 1940s his thought veered towards the direction of conservative revolution, as described in Mann’s novel. To complement the understanding of conservative revolution, I also draw on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s seminal speech from 1927, which helps to determine how much Heidegger’s philosophy partakes of the spirit of conservative revolution in Germany.

This chapter deals with the concept of being in Mesoamerican traditions, which to some extent resembles what we find in other global traditions. The chapter covers concept such as the Yucatec Maya itz and the Nahuatl teotl as a kind of basic stuff of the cosmos determining its nature. It is not quite right to call these constituents of reality, in the sense of a material such as atoms that make up the world in physicalistic systems. Instead, these concepts should be understood as expressing the nature of reality itself, that is, being itself, underlying, prior to, and sustaining all particular things.

This analysis of Jacobi’s pivotal Spinoza Letters illustrates that the driving force behind his innovative altercation with Spinoza lies not in religious motives, but rather in motives derived from the philosophy of action. By putting into effect the contradiction between system and freedom in the practical sphere, Jacobi opened up new perspectives in modernity’s own self-understanding.