Metaphysics

Introduction to Metaphysics

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Martin Heidegger

1935

Based on lectures delivered at Freiburg in 1935, this work returns to the foundational question of philosophy — "Why are there beings at all, rather than nothing?" — and pursues it with an intensity that distinguishes it from every handbook and textbook approach. Heidegger traces the history of Western thought from the pre-Socratics forward, arguing that the original Greek experience of physis, logos, and aletheia was progressively obscured by the metaphysical tradition. The unfolding of Western metaphysics is not progress but forgetfulness — a forgetting of Being that culminates in the domination of technology and the nihilism of modernity.