Metaphysics

Being and Time

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Martin Heidegger

1927

Heidegger's magnum opus opens with a question that Western philosophy had forgotten it needed to ask: what does it mean to be? The investigation proceeds through an analysis of Dasein — the kind of being that we ourselves are — revealing existence as structured by care, thrownness, projection, and always-impending death. Being-in-the-world replaces the Cartesian picture of a subject confronting objects; authenticity and inauthenticity replace virtue and vice; anxiety discloses the groundlessness on which all human projects rest. Being and Time transformed phenomenology, launched existentialism, and rewired the conceptual vocabulary of continental philosophy for a century.