The fourth chapter examines the problem of the causality of the unmoved mover. This issue is central in scholarship on Aristotle and goes back to late antiquity. I argue that here Proclus’ non-harmonist stance towards Aristotle emerges most strongly: not only did Aristotle fail to make the intellect an efficient cause of the cosmos’ being but his metaphysics generally is deficient, since he did not recognise the Platonic One as the highest principle. I contrast Proclus’ view with the position of Ammonius and Simplicius who see a complete agreement between Plato and Aristotle.

The chapter’s first section develops the book’s underlying argument that the moral psychology of violation involves synthesising metaphysical expression and its metapsychological grounds. Its second section engages with Martha Nussbaum’s argument in Anger and Forgiveness (2016) that we should understand guilt and forgiveness without reference to metapsychology, and only in terms of unconditional love leading to eudaimonic social ‘Transition’. Against this, I argue that guilt and forgiveness remain morally important and we see this in the parable of the prodigal son. Where Nussbaum argues that the father’s unconditional love sets aside questions of forgiveness, I suggest that such moral questions between a father and son remain at stake. A third section offers a ‘case study’ of guilt and forgiveness in the dialogue between Jo Berry, whose father died in the IRA Brighton bombing of 1984, and Patrick Magee, one of the bombers. This shows how difficult moral dialogues around blame, guilt and forgiveness are central to reconciliation, though this may be blocked by surrounding unresolved social and political questions. Overall, connecting metaphysics and metapsychology enables us to see why moral transactions (distinguished from legal ones) and social transitions are both necessary for reconciliation.

This chapter introduces the key metaphysical concepts that are integral to understanding the nature of time. It also critically assesses the leading arguments in this intellectual landscape, arguing that there are compelling metaphysical reasons to endorse a B-theory or C-theory and reject all A-theories (particularly presentism, the growing block, and the moving spotlight).

In this penultimate chapter, we take up the philosophical question of whether immortality is truly desirable, seeking to establish an important difference between existing for a finite and for an infinite stretch of time by introducing the following important consideration. If it remains possible for an event to occur, then even an extremely unlikely event is certain to occur, given infinite time. I shall suggest that this consideration leads to insuperable problems with the most popular scenarios currently being envisioned for achieving immortality by techno-scientific means. These problems, moreover, motivate us to think more deeply about death and thereby rethink the requirements of a genuinely meaningful human life. Drawing on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and other existential thinkers, I suggest that human beings’ most abiding sources of meaningfulness come not from endlessly repeating certain profound experiences (which sometimes does wear out their appeal) but, instead, from our struggle to stay true to and so continue to creatively and responsibly disclose what such momentous events, often rare and singular, only partly reveal to us in the first place, as we often come to realize only in retrospect – much as Heidegger came only retrospectively to recognize and then spend his life creatively disclosing the seemingly inexhaustible ontological riches of that ambiguous “nothing” Being and Time first glimpsed in the momentous experience of existential death, but in a way that Heidegger only partly understood at that time.

Metaphysics is often understood as an inquiry into the fundamental structures of reality. Collingwood, by contrast, defends a view of metaphysics on which its role is not to advance knowledge of fundamental reality but to deepen our understanding of the presuppositions on which knowledge rests. On Collingwood’s view, knowledge requires explanation, explanations are answers to questions, and questions rest on presuppositions. The metaphysician’s task is to trace the entailment relations that hold between answers, the questions they seek to answer, and the presuppositions that give rise to the questions characteristic of different forms of knowledge. This exposes misunderstandings which arise when answers to a question of one kind are erroneously taken to be in conflict with answers to questions of a different kind, ones resting on different presuppositions and pursuing different explanatory goals. This chapter outlines Collingwood’s conception of presuppositional analysis and his distinctive views of the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics. It also explores affinities between Collingwood’s conception of metaphysics and Wittgenstein’s hinge epistemology.

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 Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (2005), I sought to establish and build upon the hermeneutic thesis that Heidegger’s concern to reform education spans his entire career of thought. In my view, a radical rethinking of education – in a word, an ontologization of education, one that situates a transformative death and rebirth of the self at the very heart of the educational vision that founded the philosophical academy in Plato’s Republic – forms one of the deep thematic undercurrents of Heidegger’s work, early as well as late. We will come back to this “ontologization” of education at the end, but I want to begin by addressing a worry I did not previously thematize and confront. If my interpretive thesis is correct, then we should expect to find some sign of Heidegger’s supposed lifelong concern with education in his early magnum opus, Being and Time. The fact, then, that little or nothing had been written on Being and Time’s “philosophy of education” before my first book came out could reasonably be taken to cast doubt upon my thesis that a philosophical rethinking of education was of great importance to Heidegger’s work as a whole. Such a worry, of course, does not arise deductively; even if Being and Time contained no philosophy of education, one might be able to explain such an omission in a way that would leave my general thesis intact. Rather than trying to preserve the thesis in the face of such a hermeneutic anomaly, however, I will instead demonstrate that no such anomaly exists. This chapter will seek both to show that Heidegger’s philosophy of education deeply permeates Being and Time and to explain some of the context and significance of this fact, thereby coming to understand yet another interlocking set of philosophical implications arising from Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death.

This introductory chapter seeks to answer the question of what Heidegger means by “death” (Tod) in Being and Time – and begin to justify that answer. I take up this weighty topic with some trepidation (if not quite fear and trembling) in part because to say that the meaning of “death” in Being and Time is controversial is to strain the limits of understatement. In addition to the emotionally freighted nature of the topic itself (to which we will return), I think four main factors contribute to and perpetuate this controversy: (1) Heidegger’s confusing terminology; (2) the centrality of the issue to the text as a whole; (3) the demanding nature of what is required to adjudicate the matter; and (4) the radically polarized scholarly literature on the subject. One of my main goals here is to suggest a way to move beyond the controversy that currently divides the field, so let me begin by saying a bit about its four main contributing factors.