Across the Categorial Difference - Focality, Univocity, Ownness

Across the Categorial Difference: Focality, Univocity, Ownness examines a question that has organised ontology since Aristotle: if being is said in many ways, what makes those ways belong to one field rather than form a mere list? The study reconstructs the two principal answers given to this problem. The first is focality, or pros hen predication, which orders derivative senses of being toward a primary case. The second is univocity, which secures unity through a single concept of being and relocates plurality within its modes or differences. Through analyses of Aristotle, Scotus, Leibniz, Deleuze, and contemporary ontological pluralism, the article argues that these have appeared to exhaust the available options because both operate where categorial difference is understood through comparison, measure, or degree. The article then proposes a third answer. A category marked by a genuinely non-scalar differentia need not be unified by a focal term or contained within a single common sense. The relevant differentia is ownness: the non-vicarious character of an obtaining as someone rather than merely something. On this basis, categorial plurality can remain irreducibly plural without hierarchy, common measure, or privileged centre. The result develops the programme of a-metaphysical ontology and the doctrine of modal coincidence, while remaining independently assessable through explicit objections, regional controls, and falsification conditions. Preprint, Version 1.0, 29 July 2026.