To us, Aristotle’s point may seem rather trivial. He is simply telling us that the thing is a substance with qualities, or, put more broadly, with properties. The point Heidegger wants to make, however, is that our self-evident understanding of the thing as a property-bearing substance was the outcome of considerable intellectual effort and philosophical ingenuity. It is not obvious that the thing is best understood by analogy to the proposition. When we see a white shirt we do not see a shirt, on the one hand, and its being white, on the other. We see a white shirt. Separating the shirt into substance and property may strike one, after all, as a rather odd thing to do.

¶ 10:54 PM