Substance Templates and Modes of Being: Millikan Meets Heidegger
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23925/2764-0892.2025.v4.n2.e76056Keywords:
Heidegger, Millikan, Ontology, Natural Kinds, Substance Templates, Modes of Being, Categorial GeneralityAbstract
This paper proposes a reinterpretation of Heidegger’s notion of modes of Being (Seinsweisen) by drawing on Ruth Millikan’s theory of substance templates. Against recent realist readings that treat modes of Being as ontological universals defining natural kinds (Kelly 2016; McDaniel 2009), I argue that modes of Being do not cut reality at its joints, but rather articulate the conditions of intelligibility of beings as such. Millikan’s concept of substance templates offers a naturalistic model for understanding this form of generality: substance templates determine the kinds of questions and inductive expectations appropriate to different ontological domains, while remaining prior to any empirical induction. Interpreting Heidegger’s modes of Being as substance templates allows us to meet what I call the Metacategorial Condition: that each mode of Being provides a distinctive way of predication, irreducible to either empirical kinds or mere conceptual schemes.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
