An idea · Pre-Socratic · first attested 480 BCE
Being
What is, is. What is not, is unthinkable.
Parmenides' single category — what-is — is the seed of metaphysics. To exist, to be a "thing," to be the subject of any thought at all: this is the deepest problem of philosophy. Aristotle calls metaphysics "the science of being qua being." Heidegger reopens the question 2,400 years later and accuses every philosopher in between of having forgotten how to ask it.