that which belongs to things, that which belongs to events, and that which belongs
to ideal laws. And even in the early twentieth century, wefind many friends of
ways of being, including such importantfigures as Alexius Meinong (1983: 49–62),
G.E. Moore (1993: 161–3), Bertrand Russell (1997: 91–100), L. Susan Stebbing (1917),
Edmund Husserl (2005a: 249–50; 2005b: 17), Edith Stein (2002, 2009), and Martin
Heidegger (1962). Recall that it was common in the days before Quine for philo-
sophers to distinguish between the way in which an abstract object is—itsubsists—and
the way in which a concrete object is—itexists.Wefind variants of this distinction in
the early works of Moore, Russell, Stebbing, Meinong, and Husserl.^7
The ideas we are considering and the terminology I used earlier to convey them
could use some clearing up. And it would be nice if the various ways in which being
might fragment could be systematically accounted for. Both of these jobs are import-
ant preparatory tasks for the more important projects of determining whether being
does in fact fragment, and if it does fragment, determining how it fragments. For this
reason, chapter 1 is devoted to explicating the idea that there are modes of being, and
to developing a catalogue of ways in which being might fragment.
There is only one way for being to be unitary, but being might fragment in many
different ways, some of which are more extreme than others. One of the milder ways
in which being might fragment is one in which, although there are different modes of
being enjoyed by different objects, there is a maximally general mode of being that
everything enjoys as well. A red sphere and a blue sphere enjoy different ways of
being colored but they still share a common property, the determinable of being
colored. Similarly, the various ways of being might be something like determinates of
a common determinable, being itself.
There are other interesting relations between what can be called in a broad sense
“features”besides the relation that determinates bear to determinables. Perhaps the
various modes of being are related to an overarching mode of being by beingspecies
of that overarching mode, which in turn we construe as agenus. On this view, the
overarching mode of being is a universal genus, and the particular modes of being are
derived by conjoining that genus with various differentiating characteristics. It is this
sort of view that Aristotle rejects by claiming that being is not a genus.^8 But it is also
in the spirit of the Aristotelian position to reject the claim that there is a common
determinable, being, of which the other modes are determinates.
A more radical way in which being might fragment is one in which there is no
most general mode of being, and so the way in which the number two exists and the
way in which a stone exists are not unified by an overarching determinable or genus
and instead are, at most, unified by some more tenuous relation. This is a historically
popular view: the various ways of being are related onlyanalogically. In chapter 2,
I provide a contemporary spin on the old idea that being is unified only analogically.
(^7) See also Marvin (1912: 106–8), Moore (1927: 102–5), and Ryle (1971: 16–22).
(^8) Aristotle says this in many places, such asMetaphysicsIII.3, 998b21 (Aristotle 1984b: 1577).