The parsing of the word ‘Being’ attributed to Parmenides was the purpose of an essay Hopkins composed while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. The construal of that word by Scholastic metaphysicians led Heidegger to compose a dissertation under the title Treatise on Duns Scotus’ Theory of Categories and Signification (1916). His work on that study was a factor that contributed to the strengthening of his resolve to undertake the writing of Being and Time in order to put in perspective the ancient onto-theological tradition for which being is a being, possibly the highest being usually called God, possibly some other being (Idea, Form, cause, will to power …), but always a being that conceals the ‘ontological difference’ between beings and being as such, a difference implicit in the ambiguity of one of the Greek terms for ‘being’, τò őν.

The modern tradition should not be regarded as only a historical successor to the ancient tradition. That this is not how Heidegger conceives the relation between them is confirmed by his borrowing as an epigraph for the Introduction of his Treatise Hegel's statement that ‘with regard to the inner essence of Philosophy there are neither predecessors nor successors’. In his study supposedly of Scotus, Heidegger himself says regarding medieval philosophy that ‘despite these metaphysical “inclusions” which cast light on the main tendencies of Scholasticism and which, as such, suppress or rather render impossible “phenomenological reduction”, within the thinking of the Scholastic kind, and all the more markedly with it, there remain latent points of phenomenological reflection’. Frederick Copleston assents to this opinion when he writes that ‘Scotus’ doctrine of abstract knowledge, the knowledge of essences in abstraction from existence and non-existence, has led to the comparison of this aspect of his thought with the method of the modern Phenomenological School’.

Copleston's comparison is limited to Scotus’ doctrine of abstract knowledge. It does not hold for the latter's doctrine of concrete intuitive knowledge of singulars as such. Nor, therefore, does it abstract from existence.