There I explicate the more general idea of a feature’s being analogous and then apply
this account to the case of being.
Red flags might have been raised when I compared being with attributes or
properties such as color. This comparison suggests that being, and the various
modes of being, are themselves properties, but there are reasons to be cautious
about suggesting such things. First, there might not be any properties, but we
might still want to distinguish between different ways things might exist. Relatedly,
we might not want to think of being as being itself a being, and similarly for modes of
being, even if in general we believe that properties are entities. Moreover, even if we
are comfortable with believing in properties, we might worry that we shouldn’t think
of being or existence as properties of things such as stones or numbers. For example,
we might be attracted to a view often attributed to Frege and Russell, and sometimes
even Kant, according to which, if being or existence are features, they are features of
“higher-order”entities.^9 On this view, it is not Sam the Stone that has the property of
existence, but rather the property of being Sam the Stone, or the concept of Sam the
Stone, or some such. We’ll revisit these worries in more depth in chapters 1 and 2, as
well as in chapter 4.
For the sake of brevity, call the view that there are ways of beingontological
pluralism.^10 The bulk of thefirst half of this book consists in the exploration of
various arguments for ontological pluralism.
But in addition to considering whether there are distinct modes of being, we’ll also
explore whether being comes in amounts or degrees. Are some things greater in
being than others? As I hope will be apparent later in the book, three different
conceptions of ontological superiority should be carefully distinguished. But these
three conceptions are not necessarily competitors. Rather, in my view, they simply
have differentfields of application.
Consider the following putative pairs of entities, each of which contains an
element ontologically superior to its complement: a substance and one of its
modes, an existing object and a Meinongian object that fails to exist or subsist, and
a donut and the hole in the donut. In each case, thekindof ontological superiority is
different. Clarifying these different kinds of ontological superiority goes hand and
hand with regimenting the terminology used to label them. To anticipate later
chapters, substances enjoy a better orderof being than modes, existing objects
enjoy ahigher levelof being than non-existent objects, and presences enjoy agreater
degreeof being than absences. There are actually two tasks here: to clarify and
(^9) See Frege (1980a: 64–5; 1980b: 38) and Russell (1968: 232–3) for representative articulations of the
view. See McDaniel (2013a) for critical discussion of one of the main arguments for this view. Bennett
(1974: 62–3) attributes this to Kant; the text in Kant that inspires this interpretation is Kant (1999a: 567,
A599/B627). Remarks in Heidegger (1988: 41, 55) suggest that he also attributes this view to Kant. 10
When Ifirst began my examinations of the doctrine that there are modes of being, I did not use
“ontological pluralism”as its name. Sadly, I gave it no name. Jason Turner (2010) later suggested this name
for the doctrine I defended. Since the name is both apt and evocative, I have since adopted it.