ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 into a peasant family in Messkirch, a small town in the Black Forest region of southwest Germany. Save for annual visits to Provence in the 1950s and 1960s, and two visits to Greece, he spent almost his entire life in the region of his birth. Being and Time is the masterwork of Heidegger's early period, the only 'big book' in the style of the German philosophical tradition that he wrote for publication. Heidegger says that his method of carrying out his task of liberation is 'phenomenology'. Phenomenology, he emphasizes, is just a method, not a 'philosophical "movement"'. Ontologically, 'world' is not a being but rather the condition of the beings that are in the world being in their world, the condition, as one may put it, of their worldliness.
