To be is to differ.  We must take care not to be lured by language.  We might wish to draw a distinction between being and becoming, treating being as that which does not change and becoming as that which changes.  Yet nothing about the term “being” implies stasis.  Being denotes existence and with the exception of those beings that perhaps don’t become such as mathematical entities, all existing entities become.  Existence, for the most part, is phusis; though the concept of phusis must be rethought in light of both the materialist tradition descending from Democritus and modern physical and biological sciences.  We must avoid the animisms of vitalism.  Those that renounce ontology on the grounds that they endorse becoming are particularly irritating because they don’t seem to recognize that they’re making an ontological claim about the nature of being or existence.

Being differ in a variety of ways.  Here…