ABSTRACT
Heidegger says repeatedly that the problem of the nature of being had been forgotten by traditional philosophy. But this is not correct. It is true that you will not find many discussions of it. But this is due to the fact that the Aristotelian tradition had more or less settled on a particular solution of the problem. There was a standard view which was widely accepted. According to this view, being is a transcendental genus, a most general property. It is a property which everything has. It is a property which all entities have, since the term ‘entity’ means ‘a being’. To be an entity and to have being are one and the same thing. Perhaps you can sense that we are up against another ontological puzzle: how can we possibly claim that everything has being without either saying something that is trivially true or else saying something that is false? If by ‘everything’ we mean ‘every entity’, then we assert that everything that has being has being, and that is trivial. But if we mean by ‘everything’ something like ‘every object of thought’, then we assert something false; for the golden mountain is an object of thought, but it does not have being. We shall return to this difficulty later on.
