Being and Time describes his project in the following way: "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of "being" and to do so concretely." Heidegger claims that traditional ontology has prejudicially overlooked this question, dismissing it on the basis that being is the most universal and emptiest concept, that is indefinable or obvious. Instead Heidegger proposes to understand being itself, as distinguished from any specific entities (beings). "'Being' is not something like a being." Being, Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." Heidegger is seeking
Being work of such influential theorists as W. V. O. Quine, to name one of many. One of the most fundamental questions that continues to exercise philosophers is posed by William James: "How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? ... from nothing to being there is no logical bridge." The deficit of such a bridge was first encountered in history by the Pre-Socratic philosophers during the process of evolving a classification of all beings (noun). Aristotle, who wrote after the Pre-Socratics, applies the term category (perhaps not originally)