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WILHELM HALBFASS
On Being and What There Is: Indian Perspectives on the
Question of Being
Comparative Philosophy “What is being?” In the fourth-century B.C. Aristotle says about this question that it "was raised of old and is raised now and always, and is always the subject of inquiry,” and he designs the classical and paradoxical idea of “a science which investigates being as being, and the attributes which belong to it according to its own nature.” More than 2,000 years later we may acknowledge that the question is still with us. Yet we are in doubt with regard not only to its answer, but also to its meaning and status as a question, and to its very questionability. In fact, we may say that one of the more remarkable ways in which the question of being persists today is the question: Is there a question?
“The question is: Is being a mere word and its meaning a vapor, or does what is designated by the word 'being' hold within it the historical destiny of the West?"2 Whether it is the “historical destiny of the West” or only a symptomatically Western misunderstanding, it is obviously correct that the question of being, as an explicit theme and program, and as framework of a philosophical discipline, has been formulated only in the West, initially by the Greeks. Among those who emphasize this today, critical, and even reductionist, tendencies are prevailing. Very often the interest in the question is nothing more than an interest in relating it to the contingencies of its historical occurrence, and, more specifically, in revealing its linguistic relativity: The history of "ontology” is claimed as a test case for demonstrating the linguistic conditions of philosophical ideas and problems; the ambiguous grammar of the verb to be, with its confusion of existential and copula functions, appears as the source and real depth of the intricacies traditionally associated with the question of being. The study of language, both as structural and logical analysis and as empirical study of their actual variety, seems to be more fundamental than the study of being (understood as being') itself. J.W.M. Verhaar expresses his