Abstract

During the darkest years of the SecondWorldWar, the French esthetician Étienne Souriau developed an original pluralist ontology based on the notion of “mode of existence”. Unlike the better-known Jamesian pluralism, Souriau’s perspective is characterized by the fact of being an “existential” pluralism, namely a pluralism of the “modes” of existence. How many modes are there? In his original inquiry into being, Souriau introduces two different existential “cycles”: within the former, which aims at investigating the “ontic realm” starting from the phenomenon’s mode of being, he distinguishes three modes of existence “in aseity” and “in abaliety”.