In a review of the work of Karl Jaspers composed several years before the publication of his
book Being and Time Martin Heidegger suggested that the philosophical orientations of his
period had made a wrong turn and skirted by the fundamental path of thought. He suggested that
instead of taking up a heritage of original questions his contemporaries had become
preoccupied with secondary issues accepting as fundamental what was in fact only incidental.
In the years that followed Heidegger's promise to reorient philosophy in terms of the
Seinsfrage the question of Being exercised a well-known influence on successive generations
of thinkers on a global scale. The present book delves into the philosophical sources of this
influence and raises the question whether Heidegger indeed made good on the promise to reveal
for thought what is truly fundamental. In proposing this investigation the author assumes that
it is not sufficient to take Heidegger at his word but that it is necessary to scrutinize what
is posited as fundamental in light of its broader implications-above all for ethico-political
judgment and for historical reflection. After addressing this question in the first part of the
book the second part examines the significance of Heidegger's reorientation of philosophy
through the prism of its critical reception in the thought of Hannah Arendt Ernst Cassirer
Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur.
