ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger’s concern is with something much older and more fundamental than the logic of Duns Scotus or Aristotle. He deliberately returns beyond Plato to the earliest Greek thinkers. He insists that the problem with which he is concerned is not that of existence but that of Being, that he belongs with Parmenides rather than with Kierkegaard. Heidegger’s thought is so complex and so searching that it seems overbold to claim that one has understood him. It is so easy to read him with the presuppositions in one’s mind that have governed European philosophy since Plato, when, he is out to challenge and reject those presuppositions. The right attitude to death is to envisage it as involved in life. Death is not the axe that cuts down the tree, it is the fruit that grows on it.
