ABSTRACT
In the United States Martin Heidegger stands in the center of philosophical discussion in a very significant way, and for a long time the philosophical interest of Latin America has been bound up with him. Heidegger’s epoch-making work Being and Time appeared in 1927 in Husserl’s Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und phanomenologische Forschung, and it was dedicated to Edmund Husserl. In Husserl’s and Heidegger’s explanations of Descartes we can see clearly the difference between respectively the phenomenological interpretation and the interpretation in terms of the history of being. For Husserl, Descartes was the exemplar, the forerunner, the liberator, because he dared to question everything and to put his methodical doubt at the center of his philosophizing. Descartes’ metaphysics is the decisive beginning in laying the foundations for the metaphysics of the modern age. Metaphysics is not to be surmounted or transcended by a meta-metaphysics; rather, by thinking through metaphysics we should be brought to the point of thinking upon being.
