| 449 | Being is not divisible, since it is all alike [Parmenides] |
| Full Idea: Being is not divisible, since it is all alike. | |
| From: Parmenides (fragments/reports [c.474 BCE], B08 ll.?), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 9.145.1- |
| 448 | No necessity could produce Being either later or earlier, so it must exist absolutely or not at all [Parmenides] |
| Full Idea: What necessity impelled Being, if it did spring from nothing, to be produced later or earlier? Thus it must be absolutely, or not at all. | |
| From: Parmenides (fragments/reports [c.474 BCE], B08 ll.?), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 9.145.1- |
| 447 | Being must be eternal and uncreated, and hence it is timeless [Parmenides] |
| Full Idea: Being has no coming-to-be and no destruction, for it is whole of limb, without motion, and without end. And it never was, nor will be, because it is now, a whole all together, one, continuous; for what creation of it will you look for? | |
| From: Parmenides (fragments/reports [c.474 BCE], B08 ll.?), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 9.145.1- |
| 12270 | Being is one [Melissus, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Being is one. | |
| From: report of Melissus (fragments/reports [c.443 BCE]) by Aristotle - Topics 104b23 | |
| A reaction: I can only really understand this in terms of physics, as the belief that ultimately there is one simple theory which explains everything. That project doesn't look terribly promising, despite the lovely simplifications of modern physics. |
| 20901 | True Being only occurs when it is completely full, with atoms and no void [Democritus, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: In response to defenders of the One, Democritus says that what is, in the proper sense, is being that is completely full, but that such a being is not one, but that they are unlimited in number and invisible because of the smallness of their masses. | |
| From: report of Democritus (fragments/reports [c.431 BCE], A007) by Aristotle - Coming-to-be and Passing-away (Gen/Corr) 325a28 | |
| A reaction: Democritus is in a tangle here. He says proper being has no void, having apparently conceded that motion needs void (which he admits is non-existent). So true being only occurs when everything grinds to a halt, which is not now. But Idea 20902. |
| 12348 | There are four kinds of being: incidental, per se, potential and actual, and being as truth [Aristotle, by Wedin] |
| Full Idea: In 'Metaphysics' Δ.7 Aristotle lists four kinds of being ('to on'): incidental being, per se being, potential and actual being, and being as truth. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], 1017a07-) by Michael V. Wedin - Aristotle's Theory of Substance III.1 | |
| A reaction: These don't seem to be mutually exclusive, though the first two are, and potential and actual are. They look like three ways of getting at being. |
| 11194 | Being is either what falls in the categories, or what makes propositions true [Aristotle, by Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle says there are two proper uses of the term 'being': firstly, for whatever falls into one of Aristotle's ten basic categories of thing, and secondly for whatever makes a proposition true. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], 1017a21-35) by Thomas Aquinas - De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) p.91 | |
| A reaction: The first sounds circular, because the categories must be selected for whatever has being (see Idea 11196). The first sounds Fregean, and very congenial to modern philosophy (though you need a clear notion of 'true'). Or it is being as truth-makers. |
| 11288 | Things are predicated of the basic thing, which isn't predicated of anything else [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: The subject [to hupokeimenon, the underlying thing] is that of which other entities are said, it itself never being said-of anything else. | |
| From: Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], 1029b36) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the core or basis of being in 'Categories', which is rejected in favour of the more substantial (and determinate and explanatory) 'essence' in 'Metaphysics'. |
| 15776 | There is only being in a certain way, and without that way there is no being [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: If the thing has being, it has it in a certain way and, if it does not have being in a certain way, it does not have being at all. | |
| From: Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], 1051b34) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be a key remark in ontology, and one that may not have been sufficiently heeded by Hegel and Heidegger. The only way to investigate being qua being is to investigate ways of being, which involves identity, categories etc. |
| 611 | Being, taken simply as being, is the domain of philosophy [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Being qua being, taken universally and not in regard to some part of it, is the domain of the science of philosophy. | |
| From: Aristotle (Metaphysics [c.324 BCE], 1060b23) |
| 22121 | The concept of being has only one meaning, whether talking of universals or of God [Duns Scotus, by Dumont] |
| Full Idea: Duns Scotus was the first scholastic to hold that the concept of being and other transcendentals were univocal, not only in application to substance and accidents, but even to God and creatures. | |
| From: report of John Duns Scotus (works [1301]) by Stephen D. Dumont - Duns Scotus p.205 | |
| A reaction: So either it exists or it doesn't. No nonsense about 'subsisting'. Russell flirted with subsistence, but Quine agrees with Duns Scotus (and so do I). |
| 22122 | Being (not sensation or God) is the primary object of the intellect [Duns Scotus, by Dumont] |
| Full Idea: Duns Scotus said the primary object of the created intellect was being, rejecting Aquinas's Aristotelian view that it was limited to the quiddity of the sense particular, and Henry of Ghent's Augustinian view that it was God. | |
| From: report of John Duns Scotus (works [1301]) by Stephen D. Dumont - Duns Scotus p.205 | |
| A reaction: I suppose the 'primary object of the intellect' is the rationalist/empiricism disagreement. So (roughly) Aquinas was an empiricist, Duns Scotus was a rationalist, and Augustine was a transcendentalist? Augustine sounds like Spinoza. |
| 16789 | Only supernatural means could annihilate anything once it had being [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: A being cannot naturally go out of existence. For even if a ship or a plank ceases to be a ship or a plank, it never naturally ceases to be a being. For a being, unless it is annihilated, does not cease to be a being. To annihilate is a supernatural task. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (De Mundo (On the World) [1642], 12.5) | |
| A reaction: This idea was becoming an orthodoxy in Hobbes's time, and leads to the various conservation laws in physics. |
| 6919 | Absolute thought remains in another world from being [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Absolute thought never extricates itself from itself to become being. Being remains in another world. …If being is to be added to an object of thought, so must something distinct from thought be added to thought itself. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], §24/5) | |
| A reaction: This sounds a bit like a child wishing for the moon. Is he saying he doesn't just want to think about reality - he wants his mental states to BE external reality? The distinction between a thought and its content or intentionality would help here. |
| 19457 | Being is what is undetermined, and hence indistinguishable [Feuerbach] |
| Full Idea: Being in the sense in which it is an object of speculative thought is that which is purely and simply unmediated, that is, undetermined; in other words, there is nothing to distinguish and nothing to think of in being. | |
| From: Ludwig Feuerbach (Principles of Philosophy of the Future [1843], 26) | |
| A reaction: This sounds remarkably like the idea of 'prime matter' used in scholastic Aristotelian philosophy. Matter existing without form is somehow ungraspable, but presented from Hegel onwards as the ultimate mystery. |
| 22209 | Our goal is to reveal a new hidden region of Being [Husserl] |
| Full Idea: We could refer to our goal as the winning of a new region of Being, the distinctive character of which has not yet been defined. | |
| From: Edmund Husserl (Ideas: intro to pure phenomenology [1913], II.2.033) | |
| A reaction: The obvious fruit of this idea, I would think, is Heidegger's concept of Da-sein, which claims to be a distinctively human region of Being. I'm not sure I can cope with the claim that Being itself (a very broad-brush term) has hidden regions. |
| 11010 | Being is what belongs to every possible object of thought [Russell] |
| Full Idea: Being is that which belongs to every conceivable, to every possible object of thought. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (The Principles of Mathematics [1903]), quoted by Stephen Read - Thinking About Logic Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: I take Russell's (or anyone's) attempt to distinguish two different senses of the word 'being' or 'exist' to be an umitigated metaphysical disaster. |
| 21897 | Reducing being to the study of beings too readily accepts the modern scientific view [Heidegger, by May] |
| Full Idea: Continental philosophers, following Heidegger, see in the attempt to reduce the question of being to that of beings a symptom of an age that is too ready to accept the terms in which science conceives the world. | |
| From: report of Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927]) by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 1.04 | |
| A reaction: Interesting. I take the idea that this is a failing of the modern age to be ridiculous, since I take it to be the key metaphysical move made by Aristotle. Neverthless, Aristotle is closely in tune with modern science. For 'beings', read 'objects'. |
| 15573 | For us, Being is constituted by awareness of other sorts of Being [Heidegger] |
| Full Idea: We are Dasein - the entity who possesses - as constitutive for its understanding of existence - an understanding of the Being of all entities of a character other than its own. | |
| From: Martin Heidegger (Being and Time [1927], 34/13), quoted by Richard Polt - Heidegger: an introduction 3.§4 | |
| A reaction: This seems to connect to the emerging 'externalist' view of mind that comes with the external view of content coming from Purnam's Twin Earth idea. |
| 22333 | Only language is understandable Being [Gadamer] |
| Full Idea: Being that can be understood is language. | |
| From: Hans-Georg Gadamer (Truth and Method [1960], p.450), quoted by Hans-Johann Glock - What is Analytic Philosophy? 5.2 | |
| A reaction: [also 1967 p.19] Glock quotes this to show that continental philosophers are just as linguistic in their approach as the analytic school. I think the main aim of representational painting is to grasp non-linguistic Being. |
| 21908 | Ontology can be continual creation, not to know being, but to probe the unknowable [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Ontology can be an ontology of difference ....where what is there is not the same old things but a process of continual creation, an ontology that does not seek to reduce being to the knowable, but widens thought to palpate the unknowable. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968]), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 5.05 | |
| A reaction: I'm inclined to think that the first duty of ontology is to face up to the knowable. I'm not sure that probing the unknowable, with no success or prospect of it, is a good way to spend a life. Probing ('palpating') can sometimes discover things. |
| 21902 | 'Being' is univocal, but its subject matter is actually 'difference' [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition [1968], p.36), quoted by Todd May - Gilles Deleuze 3.03 | |
| A reaction: This is an attempt to express the Heraclitean view of reality, as process, movement, multiplicity - something which always eludes our attempts to pin it down. |
| 14664 | Necessary beings (numbers, properties, sets, propositions, states of affairs, God) exist in all possible worlds [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: A 'necessary being' is one that exists in every possible world; and only some objects - numbers, properties, pure sets, propositions, states of affairs, God - have this distinction. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (Actualism and Possible Worlds [1976], 2) | |
| A reaction: This a very odd list, though it is fairly orthodox among philosophers trained in modern modal logic. At the very least it looks rather parochial to me. |
| 12340 | There is no Being as a whole, because there is no set of all sets [Badiou] |
| Full Idea: The fundamental theorem that 'there does not exist a set of all sets' designates the inexistence of Being as a whole. ...A crucial consequence of this property is that any ontological investigation is irremediably local. | |
| From: Alain Badiou (Briefings on Existence [1998], 14) | |
| A reaction: The second thought pushes Badiou into Topos Theory, where the real numbers (for example) have a separate theory in each 'topos'. |
| 9809 | Mathematics inscribes being as such [Badiou] |
| Full Idea: Mathematics inscribes being as such. | |
| From: Alain Badiou (Mathematics and Philosophy: grand and little [2004], p.12) | |
| A reaction: I don't pretend to understand that, but there is something about the purity and certainty of mathematics that makes us feel we are grappling with the core of existence. Perhaps. The same might be said of stubbing your toe on a bedpost. |
| 14401 | Every proposition is entirely about being [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Every proposition, no matter what subject matter it may have, is entirely about being. | |
| From: David Lewis (Things qua Truthmakers [2003], p.26), quoted by Trenton Merricks - Truth and Ontology 4.VI | |
| A reaction: Since Lewis's propositions are sets of possible worlds, I presume this claim is made because proposition relates to all of the possible worlds, which therefore presumably embody Being. |
| 7707 | To grasp being, we must say why something exists, and why there is one world [Jacquette] |
| Full Idea: We grasp the concept of being only when we have satisfactorily answered the question why there is something rather than nothing and why there is only one logically contingent actual world. | |
| From: Dale Jacquette (Ontology [2002], Conclusion) | |
| A reaction: See Ideas 7688 and 7692 for a glimpse of Jacquette's answer. Personally I don't yet have a full grasp of the concept of being, but I'm sure I'll get there if I only work a bit harder. |
| 12254 | Being is substantial/accidental, complete/incomplete, necessary/contingent, possible, relative, intrinsic.. [Oderberg] |
| Full Idea: Being is heterogeneous: there is substantial being, accidental being, complete being, incomplete being, necessary being, contingent being, possible being, absolute being, relative being, intrinsic being, extrinsic being, and so on. | |
| From: David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism [2007], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Dependent being? Oderberg is giving the modern scholastic view. Personally I take 'being' to be univocal, even if it can be qualified in all sorts of ways. I don't believe we actually have any grasp at all of different ways to exist. |