The Essence of Being

Kris McDaniel (Syracuse University, University of Notre Dame)

The fundamental task of ontology is to understand being. But what would an understanding of being consist in? What is the cognitive achievement of understanding being? I provisionally assume that being and existence are the same, that everything that there is has being or exists, and that to be or to exist is just to be identical with something. In previous work, I focused on the questions of whether there are different modes of being and whether being comes in degrees. I implicitly assumed that to understand being is to know the answers to questions like these. Here, I rethink these questions in light of a different account of what modes of being are, an account that explicates them in terms of a non-modal conception of essence. 

LINK: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87649813438