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During the years subsequent to the publication of Being and Time Heidegger's project to restate explicitly the question of being, the question that "has been forgotten" and lost some of its power but has never ceased to be at work in the history of philosophy, becomes more and more clearly outlined. How must philosophy question being? What does it mean to "ask in a primordial manner," to ask de profundis? In the second half of the 20's Heidegger already has an answer: "Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible"(SZ 35). The reverse is true also: "with regard to its subject-matter, phenomenology is the science of the being of beings — ontology" (SZ 37). Being of beings, being of the entity insofar as it dyers from the entity, this enigmatic difference of being (esse) and entity (ens) — such is, according to Heidegger, the main problem ofphenomenology. In a series of lectures entitled precisely The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie), delivered at Marburg University in summer 1927, while pursuing his usual hermeneutical strategy, Heidegger tries to introduce his audience to phenomenological ontology (or ontology-as-phenomenology) by explaining phenomenologically several important statements, or "theses" concerning being (Thesen überdas Sein), "which have been advocated in the course of Western philosophy since Antiquity" (GP 20). One of these statements requiring a phenomenological elucidation is "the thesis of medieval ontology (Scholasticism) which goes back to Aristotle [and asserts that] to the constitution of being of a being belong (a) whatness (Wassein,essentia), and (b) being-at-hand or extantness (Vorhandensein,existentia) (ibid.).

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3407-3_4

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