A reading order
Where to begin
The programme is one argument developed across six books, a series of deposited articles, and the standing statements of its doctrine. It can be entered at more than one point. What follows is a suggested order — with the reason for it, because the reason is more useful than the list.
1. Begin with the doctrine, not the path
The Who as a Modal Category is the shortest route to the question of whether this programme is of interest to you, because it states the result before the road to it: the who as a way in which being obtains, with a differentia that does not come in degrees. It is one page, it names what it inherits and from whom, and it prints the conditions under which it would be false.
2. Then the systematic statement
Positive No-Ground: The Common and the Locus of Answerability joins what the trilogy reached separately into a single movement. The joining is the book’s own contribution, not a restatement of the trilogy. Its result is the founding statement of the programme: positive no-ground. The common makes everything possible and finally answers for nothing; what remains when the ground is refused is not chaos but the precise structure of common possibility, address, and the answerable locus.
3. Then the category
Ethical Ontology, Volume I: The Modal Coincidence answers the question the founding statement deliberately leaves open. When every role and history is peeled from the one at the locus, the peeling finds no kernel — and should find none. What, then, is the one who answers?
4. Then the doctrine on trial
Ethical Ontology, Volume II: The Sacred Economy takes the apparatus outside itself and tests it on dated historical material, under conditions deposited in advance. It is published with a separate open-access Trial Record carrying the apparatus in full.
5. Then, for the genetic route, the trilogy
The Phenomenology of Being-With — Koinonia, No Ground, The Locus — is the path rather than the result: how its separate findings were reached, through figures rather than proofs, before the statement joined them. It is not preparatory reading. It is the evidence that the categories were found rather than posited, and it can be read before everything else by anyone who would rather walk than be told.
6. The defence and the method, at any point after the first
The Individuating Factor argues why ownness is not haecceity plus mineness, against Scotus and Heidegger, from the texts. What Would Show You Wrong? states what an ontology proceeding by disclosure owes, what it does not owe, and where the demand for falsifiability turns into something else. Each is self-standing; each answers the first objection its neighbour raises.
7. Then the two charges everyone brings
Are We Making It Up? The Forced Intention answers both at once: whether the answer was made up, and, before that, whether the problem was. It pairs with What Would Show You Wrong? — the first says how the fulfilment stays honest, the second how the question was not free to cheat. Begleiten können runs the same defence through Kant: the two readings that press hardest on the differentia are answered from one place, the double modal at B131.
8. Then where the result stands in the field
Across the Categorial Difference asks what has ever held the many senses of being in one field, finds that focality and univocity both require a differentia admitting of degree, and shows why a third answer was available. Ontological Pluralism Without Degrees of Being takes the same question to the contemporary literature, where plurality is carried by quantifiers, and argues that a degree divides a way rather than multiplying ways.
9. The other standing statement
Being by Proxy states the structure the programme is the refusal of: where the primary case holds the derivative’s title to count as a being at all, the derivative’s standing is administered elsewhere. Read beside the first statement, the two are one discovery from its two ends — the tradition’s focal structure made being itself vicarious, and the who is where vicariousness fails.
Why the order is the order
The systematic order inverts the order of composition. The trilogy was written first and the formal statement last, but the later books add rather than restate, and the systematic order is still the better introduction to the path. Read forwards — doctrine, statement, category — the programme is a position you can accept or refuse. Read backwards, through the trilogy, it is a path you can retrace and check. Both routes end at the same place, and the fact that they do is itself part of the claim.
Everything is free to read in full. Every text carries a DOI and a published SHA-256; the record is at Integrity.