ABSTRACT
Many generations of readers, among them well-known philosophers such as Sartre and Levinas, have been intrigued by Martin Heidegger’s most important book, Sein und Zeit, first published in 1927. The promise permeating the text that one may become a more authentic individual if one understands adequately Heidegger’s philosophical analysis of human existence, offers an alluring prospect. The work as a whole aims at raising anew an old question of philosophy, the so-called question of the meaning of being. Heidegger’s question of being has a bipolar structure. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that within the totality of entities or beings we can distinguish different domains or regions, of which he mentions as examples history, nature, space, life, human existence, and language. Heidegger devalues scientific knowledge in general by arguing that it is concerned merely with a phenomenal world constituted by a transcendental subject. But there are no good arguments for an ontological devaluation of science.
