It's a bit difficult to understand the difference between 'Being' and 'Existence'. From what I know, bring is the state or quality of existing. But to me this state or quality sounds extremely ghostly. Could you please elaborate? Thanks Shamik C. New Delhi India

As a philosopher working in the classical European tradition, I see the importance of the distinction between being and existence in very different terms from my colleague, Allen Stairs. His claim that “not everyone sees a distinction here” might be true for a certain segment of the 20th century analytic tradition but is certainly not the case if we look at the history of Western philosophy as a whole, for which the distinction between being and existence has been the central metaphysical question. In fact, I would argue that philosophy was born as the attempt to grapple with this very distinction. During the late 6th century BC, Heraclitus inaugurated "ontology" (the branch of metaphysics dedicated to the study of being) by focusing on the distinction between being and becoming, which roughly corresponds to that between being and existence. This correspondence was already picked up by Plato who, concerning Heraclitus’s flux doctrine, claimed the following: "Heraclitus, I believe, says that all...