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...

I believe that the meaning of the expression "war on terror" contains a metaphor and a judgment, neither of which is explicitly presented as such. This double equivocation has grave political consequences. Let me address each fold of the equivocation separately. The Metaphor of "War." I do not see how, in the "war against terror," "war" is used as anything else than a metaphor, as in the "war against cancer" or the "war against drug-trafficking." In principle, there would be nothing wrong in making use of the metaphor of war to describe the fight against terrorism, and the terror that it produces. Now, given that acts of terrorism are so destabilizing precisely because of their intrinsic production of terror (an individual and collective state of mind), I am not sure that the metaphor of war would be my pick, since it is obvious that it increases, rather than decreases, the production of terror. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, however, by formally "declaring" war on terror, the Bush...