For more than a century, the new, non-substantial ontologies have been developing in the European philosophy, in which the place of classical substance is occupied by a dynamic configuration of essentially rooted meanings. The current thesis is its discursive continuation. Nevertheless, none of them gave a response to the question about being of being itself instead of being of entities, which means directly its copula. In contrast to the local ontologies of subject, events, and various forms of object-oriented ontologies, guided by the action of the logical fallacy “petitio principii” or “assuming the conclusion”, M. Heidegger's radically ontological project can be considered as originating from a drastically new beginning, already initiated in the "Die Grundprobleme Der Phänomenologie" of 1927. In the same source, the prospects of this project were thought over by Heidegger pointwise as the final goal of preparatory Dasein-analytics, but without outright indications of its substantive basis, which only confirms the necessity and relevance of its research today.
The aim of the research is dedicated to the determining of being-copula as the subject of a radically ontological project initiated by M. Heidegger, by refuting the logical fallacy “petitio principii” and justifying the negative sub-foundations of the real truth-ἀλήθεια, represented already in the very first of the judgments about being, which is not directly in the sense as an entity/not only as an entity.
To achieve the outlined aim of the current hesis, the following tasks were singled out:
1. Pointing out that the essential role for any scientific research of Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, which owes its appearance to the Aristotelian asking for the initial thing in the form of αἰτεῖσθαι τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ.
2. Refuting the logical fallacy of “petitio principii” or “assuming the conclusion” in the question of being.
3. The revealing of the inconsistency of being with the requirements of the classical ground, which acts exclusively in a positive way.
4. Deriving the concept of copula from logical to the radically ontological discourse, based on the accompanying semantic-linguistic analysis of the verb to be.
5. Finding out that the very first of the initial ontological characteristics in the form of being is not, as an entity/not only as an entity, acts as a negative predication-circumstance that defines the copula of being.
6. Concluding that logical negation as a simplified form is rooted in nothingness, but it is not the only and not the defining type of real negation.
7. To establish in historical retrospect the extralinguistic nature of being-copula and the appropriate extraordinariness of the connection that arises between being and nothingness.
8. Substantiating the strong correlation of being-copula with the Greek concept of truth-ἀλήθεια, thereby confirming the relevance of alethic phenomenology as the methodological basis of a radically ontological project.
9. Representing the topological nature of Truth-Ereignis as a place within which being acts as a beginning, within its copula.
10. Identification of three equivalent discourses of radical ontology based on three negations of the Greek language (ου-, μη-, - α), refuting the creation of hybrid forms of ontology.
11. Determining an autonomous position of radical ontological discourse centered on the concept of copula, thereby restoring the systematicity of Heidegger's views taken separately on the question of being and at the same time regarding philosophical phenomena as such.
The author’s theoretical and methodological position was subordinated to the primary aim of the research and was based directly on Heidegger's interpretation of phenomenology, but with the author's dismantling of it in the direction of the alethic version of phenomenology. Besides, the following methods were also used: the comparative historical method (to trace the etymological extension of concepts such as ἀλήθεια and ἐνέργεια), the method of abstraction (to work on the very first of judgments about being in the form of being is not, as well as on the most unmediated concepts like nothingness), the method of structuralism (to distinguish three equivalent discourses of “radical ontology” on the basis of Greek negations).
The scientific novelty of the obtained results lies in the fact that the current thesis is the first attempt in Ukrainian philosophical thought to establish an autonomous project of [radical] ontology in accordance with the definition of the negative specificity of its subject in the form of copula.
