ABSTRACT

Although the question of what it is to be is recurrent in Western thought-conspicuously it is tackled by Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Berkeley, Kant and Hegel for example-it is Heidegger’s attempt to answer it in Sein und Zeit that provides Merleau-Ponty with his own model of how it should be addressed.2 In this chapter I examine Merleau-Ponty’s quasi-Heideggerian attempts to answer the question of being and then evaluate his explicit endorsements and repudiations of Heidegger’s ‘fundamental ontology’.