Martin Heidegger’s National Socialist political sympathies are plainer and more troubling to contemporary readers than ever before. This paper examines the relation of leader to society he uses to ground his account of the state in the 1930s. But breakthroughs in the previous decade, in Being and Time in particular, make the political ontology he endorses less compelling. Heidegger’s political positions are incompatible with his account of the ontological difference. The power of the leader of the society he or she (...) leads cannot repeat the relation of Being over entities. Ontologically speaking, totalitarianism is a category mistake. Confusing the transcendental domain for its ontical contents, Heidegger refuses to learn his own lessons in ways Eric Voegelin helps us detect. (shrink)

What makes something a unity? In his 2014 monograph One Graham Priest alleges the Socratic tradition was aware of a problem it never completely solves. Plato, Aristotle, and their medieval expositors contend the form of something is what makes it a unity. These authorities, however, have only multiplied what they meant to explain, for form is now a part of something that stands in need of unification. Taking up the issue on their behalf, Priest argues for the existence of “paraconsistent” (...) material components instead of forms to explain the unity of things. Gluons, as he designates them, are contradictory objects that solve the enduring problem of unity without generating infinite regresses he associates with other accounts of unity. Replying especially to the historical dimension of Priest’s argument, this paper summarizes Priest’s view but finds in Aristotle’s work that which Priest overlooks. Gluons superadd the unity Aristotle discovers further upstream. The source of unity is to be detected instead in the intelligent reach for an understanding of what makes something what it is. (shrink)