Abstract

The article aims to show that current understandings and developments of “metaphysics,” in both analytic and continental philosophy, fail to do justice both to the metaphysical tradition as a whole and to the potentialities inherent in that tradition’s mode and aim of thinking. The root failure is the failure to recognize that Thomas Aquinas, by distinguishing between ens and esse, reveals that metaphysics must thematize Being (esse) as well as being(s) (ens/entia). To be sure, Aquinas’s understanding of Being solely as actus essendi is fundamentally inadequate, but Being is not even a topic for analytic philosophy, for which metaphysical questions concern only being(s). The article takes seriously Heidegger’s (only partially correct) charge that an “oblivion of Being” pervades metaphysics and, against Heidegger, shows how to conceive of and develop an adequate theory of Being.