intuitions of various thinkers long dead are cited as evidence in favor of various
positions defended in this book, it is of paramount importance that those intuitions
are accurately represented.
That said, I am not an expert in the history of philosophy and won’t pretend to be
one. I’ve tried to do the best I can do given my background, training, and philo-
sophical abilities. I read my philosophical predecessors sympathetically, with a view
towardsfinding points of contact between their concerns and my own. But although
I have found the history of philosophy to be a source of inspiration, I have tried to
acknowledge that inspiration without engaging in undue anachronistic ascriptions.^23
And I have, when possible, consulted some of the (enormously large) relevant
secondary literature on thefigures cited, as well as discussed my interpretations
with living authorities on thesefigures. I hope this book will provide an illustration of
the possibility of a productive engagement of both contemporary concerns and the
history of metaphysics.^24
Similar remarks apply to the infrequent discussions of figures from Eastern
philosophy in the pages that follow. The questions I address here were addressed
not only in the history of Western philosophy, but were pressing in the history of
Eastern philosophy as well.^25 To me, this became most apparent when thinking
through the issues in chapters 5 and 6. But the discussion offigures from the history
of Western philosophy occupies more of the book than that of their counterparts in
the history of Eastern philosophy, largely because I don’t know enough about those
traditions to do more. I hope in future research to rectify this. In general, we do
ourselves as philosophers and philosophy itself a disservice by continuing to dichot-
omize philosophy in this way. But I can do now only what I can do now, and this
book is long enough as it is.
Finally, let me say one last bit about methodology. Like most philosophers, I am
puzzled and troubled by the question of what method or methods we ought to pursue
in order to acquire knowledge of the answers to philosophical questions. But I am
relatively confident of one thing: insofar as we take intuitions (whatever these might
turn out to be) to be evidence for our theories, we ought to take into account as many
(^23) Sleigh (1990: 2–4) distinguishes two ways of doing history of philosophy: exegetical history of
philosophy and philosophical history of philosophy. Exegetical history focuses on what a philosophical
text actually means, and why the philosopher actually said what he or she said. There are two ways of doing
philosophical history of philosophy. Thefirst way is to set out a philosophical theory inspired by some
historical doctrine and then correct it insofar as it is deemed to be in error; the second way is to treat the
historicalfigure as someone akin to a colleague to converse with. I suppose that insofar as I am doing
history of philosophy in this book, I am doing philosophical history of philosophy—but I am doing so only
in the hope that the historical claims made could stand up to scrutiny from an exegetical historian of
philosophy. 24
See Nolan (2007) for interesting reflections on the usefulness of the history of philosophy for
contemporary theorizing. 25
See Mou (2013) for an interesting comparison of Quine, Heidegger, and Lao-Zhuang Zi (among
many others!) on whether being fragments. For another example of an interesting parallel, Potter (1977:
134 – 5) claims that, according to the Nyāya-Vaiseśika philosophy, being is a genus.