Hoy draws a distinction between time and temporality. Whereas time, according to Hoy, refers to the universal time or objective time of physics and the natural world, temporality refers to the time of human existence. However, as Hoy's analysis of temporality proceeds, this distinction is itself called into question. In the final chapter, Hoy seems to side with the thesis of later Heidegger, holding that temporality does not issue from the subject or mind, but rather that the self or mind issues from temporality:

The contrast between the early and later Heidegger is brought out nicely in the later Heidegger's discussion of the sentence from Being and Time, "Es gibt Sein" (literally, "it gives Being," although it is better translated as "There is being"). The early Heidegger was often read as meaning by the "Es" that the giver of Being was Dasein. In 1947, however, the later Heidegger maintains in the "Letter on Humanism" that when Being and Time says "Es gibt Sein," the "Es" is Sein. In the early text, the sentence in question reads, "Only so long as Dasein is, is there [gibt es] Being." The later Heidegger claims that because Being is both the clearing and what sends the clearing, Dasein was not meant to be the clearing.

Later Hoy remarks that "it is not the subject that temporalizes, but temporality itself that temporalizes". In short, temporality is not to be conceived (as in the case of Kant or Husserl) as a product of the subject, but rather temporality is a more "primordial root" out of which the subject itself emerges.

It is here, in relation to the thesis of temporality as the primordial root of being, that questions about Hoy's project emerge. If (following the later Heidegger) temporality, not the subject, is the primordial root of being, why draw a distinction between the universal time of physics and the temporality of human existence? If, indeed, the "Es" of the "Es gibt Sein" is temporality rather than Dasein, then it would seem that the distinction between universal time and human temporality collapses and that there is no special reason to privilege human existence where inquiries into being are concerned. Both universal time and human temporality would be dimensions of this primordial root. One potential problem with Hoy's analysis of temporality is that while it is at pains to distinguish itself from the anti-realist thesis that the being of beings is unthinkable apart from a relation to the subject or mind in taking care not to equate temporality with mind or consciousness, in treating temporality as pertaining to human existence it nonetheless remains within the anti-realist orbit. Yet strangely, over the course of his investigation, Hoy develops a number of resources for delivering a realist account of temporality.

A realist account of temporality would not consist in taking the physicist at his word so that we would be called to reduce temporality to what Hoy calls "universal time". Instead, a realist account of temporality would call for a more profound metaphysics, a temporal metaphysics, that responds to the critiques of ontotheology advanced by Derrida and Heidegger, but which is nonetheless a metaphysics in the sense that it shows how the being of beings issues from temporality.

¶ 6:22 AM