Chapter 2 examines three problems in Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato: the impasse of dialogue and dialectic, Heidegger’s disastrous and putatively Platonic politics, and the reductive approach to Plato’s metaphysics. First, I question his critique of Platonic dialectic by showing that it is already built into the matter as well as the way of writing in Plato’s texts. Second, I show that Heidegger’s ontologizing of political themes in Plato’s writings leads him to a catastrophic “ontological politics” wherein ethics and politics in their concrete sense are completely eclipsed by or absorbed into ontology. Third, I show that the interpretations that Heidegger offers to show that Plato allegedly occluded the original sense of truth and distorted the question of Being. A closer look at the relevant passages as well as other passages that Heidegger overlooked reveals a much more dynamic ontology than what Heidegger sees in Platonism understood as metaphysics. The concluding remarks of the chapter sketch the post-Heideggerian directions leading from these three problems to the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

Chapter 7 is a critical analysis of Platonic ontology as interpreted by Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger. In light of philosophy’s finitude revealed through the philosopher’s philosophical journey, how can we think of Platonic Forms after Heidegger? I argue that Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger articulate interpretations of Platonic metaphysics that concludes that, for Plato, Being remains fundamentally elusive. Strauss does so via a zetetic interpretation of Forms as questions coeval with the human mind: Being remains a mystery, a riddle. Gadamer achieves this through a somewhat technical account of Forms in light of an arithmetic interpretation of our linguistic access to them. Krüger originally puts at the center of his account the erotic tension between discursive thinking and non-discursive insight. I contend that Krüger’s Platonic argument for the elusiveness of Being is superior to those of Strauss and Gadamer in two respects: (1) it is more faithful to Plato’s own writings on the difference between dianoia and noêsis, and (2) it proves a better response to Heidegger’s critique of Platonic metaphysics.

Is mind a proper topic of investigation in Aristotle’s science of nature? The question is surprisingly vexed. Although some evidence suggests that mind should be studied by natural philosophy as well as first philosophy (metaphysics), Parts of Animals I.1 (641a32−b23) presents a series of arguments often construed as decisive evidence that he excludes mind from natural philosophy. This chapter goes through the relevant text and argues that Aristotle presents three arguments to exclude mind from nature but all in the voice of an opponent. Then in a final argument (641b23−642a1) he responds directly to the third argument, with indirect implications for the second argument as well.

While the rest of the book takes the form of a constitutional law text largely based on discussion of theory and court precedent, the prologue provides the lived, empirical day-to-day context out of which the project arose by sharing the stories of the ordinary people on whom the topics discussed have primary bearing. Moreover, given the grounded, ethnographic method from which the prologue’s scene-setting stories draw and the ‘constitutional ethnography’ to be applied more broadly as a methodology throughout the book, the prologue draws inspiration from qualitative scholarship’s emphasis on the need for researchers to state their positionality vis-à-vis the research. The prologue therefore describes the global transdisciplinary approach adopted in and through the book project which primarily builds upon critical Black, Indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship developed in the Global South and by marginalised communities in the Global North.

This chapter elucidates the ways in which “narrative can serve as a tool for the orientation of consciousness.” The dual narrative of the Confessions – nine books of personal narrative, joined by a book on memory to a cosmic narrative of creation and redemption – conveys, and is intended to convey, theological truth. In his theological work Augustine draws on, amplifies, and corrects (as he sees it) such figures as Origen (though only at second hand), Basil of Caesarea, and Ambrose to articulate his own distinctive views on knowing and willing, the condition of the fallen human will, and the source and destiny of creation. In concluding remarks that elegantly distil the unity of the Confessions, that chapter observes that “Augustine cannot give an account of his life that is not also an account of the work of God.”

Fifth-century Greek tragedy and visual art centres on interaction between people, including antithetical relations, reflecting a society shaped by monetised exchange and commerce. Platonic metaphysics is focused on unchanging being, placing supreme value on the possession of money and devaluing or excluding exchange and interaction. Although dialogues such as the Phaedo contain the idea of the unity of opposites, and binary opposites such as body and soul, Platonic metaphysics aims at the negation of opposites, and thus of antithesis. The contrast between being and seeming emerges in fifth-century tragedy and philosophy, but it is given much greater prominence by Plato and is linked with the theory of Forms. One of the Platonic accounts of the relationship between Forms and particulars is in terms of original (Form) and copy or image (particulars). Plato is the first to offer a theorization of the idea of the image (in the Sophist) and to define the idea of mere image (not reality). Plato’s treatment of the being-seeming relation, like the theory of Forms generally, expresses the reification of the value of money, treated as the basis of possession, excluding exchange.

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.