The effectual : replying to responses

The opening sentences of Being and Time (§1) indicate that, according to Heidegger, Plato and Aristotle raised the question of being. A page later, Heidegger asserts that Aristotle discovered the unity of being that is distinct from the multiplicity of beings and irreducible to an easily defined concept. There are two ways to explain the provenance of the unified being in Heidegger’s thought. One would be from Heidegger’s extension of phenomenology. I find all these accounts helpful but also wanting. For example, Bernando Ainbinder [202X] says that ‘specifying the hou heneka is not a matter of calculation but of decision about the practical identity I want to pursue’. Where does the ‘decision’ come from? My alternative ‘bildungsroman’ explores how the unity of being intertwined with praxis, which includes the decision, also originates from Greece. Instead of contradicting the phenomenological account, the alternative account looks at the development of Heidegger’s thought through a different series of questions that foregrounds the conjunction of theory and praxis.