What is being? What is the meaning of being? For Heidegger in Being and Time, temporality is the primary and way of access to being. For Sartre in Being and Nothingness, being is most closely related to the nothing. Now Being and Movement argues that the meaning of being is the activity of movement and in inhabiting the dynamic unfolding of becoming itself.

Through Félix Ravaisson's idea of being as activity, and a broader synthesis of French Spiritualism, from Maine de Biran to Henri Bergson, this original account reckons with being as fundamentally active, dynamic and ever changing. It draws on Aristotle's kinesis, Leibniz's metaphysics of force, and how Ravaisson interpreted Schelling's positivity of movement, offering a full picture of the reading and translation of movement into modern philosophy. Many of the important traditions of modern philosophy have given a decisive place to ideas of power, energy, activity, and pulsion. But the originality with which French Spiritualism, as a loosely organized tradition of nineteenth and twentieth-century Continental philosophy, proposed an ontological account of being as dynamism has never been explored. This is an indispensable survey not only of Ravaisson's contribution to the new metaphysics of the late 20th century but also of French Spiritualism more widely. Drawing on the breadth of Ravaisson's work – including the volumes of his magnum opus, Essay on Aristotle's Metaphysics, as well as previously unpublished fragments of his 1834 On the Metaphysics of Aristotle – this is a philosophical synthesis of his thought on the metaphysics of movement. It shows, for the first time, how much this 19th century thinker has to contribute to contemporary philosophy.