Introduction
One of the oldest questions in metaphysics concerns not the various natures of beings
but rather the nature of being itself: is beingunitaryor does beingfragment? The
primary aims of this book are to explicate the idea that being fragments, to show how
the fragmentation of being impacts various other extant philosophical disputes, and
to defend the tenability and fruitfulness of the idea that being fragments.
These aims are interdependent. An inexplicable idea is neither tenable nor fruitful.
And an idea is fruitful only if it sheds light on extant disputes or provides new paths
for interesting research. If the claim that being fragments has no philosophical payoff
elsewhere, one must forgive those who neglect or dismiss the question of the
fragmentation of being. My hope is that I will convince you of the importance of
the claim that being fragments by extensively exploring the connections between the
various ways being might fragment and philosophical issues pertaining to metaphys-
ical fundamentality, substances and accidents, time, modality, ontological categories,
absences and presences, persons, value, ground, and essence. This book is devoted to
these explorations.
The question of whether being is unitary or fragments is a complex question whose
answer turns on the answers to (at least) the following questions. There are many
kinds of beings—stones, persons, artifacts, and perhaps numbers, abstract proposi-
tions, and maybe even God—but are there also many kinds of being? For anything
such that there is such a thing,does that thing also exist? The world contains a variety
of objects, each of which, let us provisionally assume, exists—but do some objects exist
in different ways? Some objects, let us assume, exist as a matter of necessity while
others exist merely contingently; some objects are atemporal whereas others are
bound by time (and space); some (but perhaps not all) objects are modally dependent
on others, where an objectxis modally dependent on another objectyjust in case,
necessarily,xexists only ifyexists. But do some objectsenjoy more being or existence
than other objects? Are there different ways in which one object might enjoy more
being than another?
If being is unitary rather than fragmentary, then there is only one way to be; there
are no modes of being. If being is unitary rather than fragmentary, then being is
coextensive, and in fact identical with existence, for if being and existence were not
one, existence would be a way of being. If being is unitary rather than fragmentary,
then everything that there isis to the same extent or degree.