ABSTRACT
Heidegger calls the ontology executed under phenomenology's preliminary concept "fundamental ontology", to indicate its thematic focus on "making known" (kundgebegen) "to the understanding of Being that belongs to Dasein itself" the "proper meaning of its Being" together with its "basic structures". Heidegger envisaged the universal ontological interrogation of the Being of entities to issue from within the "horizon for all further ontological research" exhibited by the results of fundamental ontology. The absence of any reference to the "as" in Heidegger's account of ontological Interpretation, however, makes it difficult to conclude one way or the other whether the structure of "something as something" is limited to inner-world entities or extends to the phenomenological interpretation of any existential structure whatever. And the mereological presupposition operative in hermeneutic phenomenology, that to the Being of entities there belongs a meaning of Being overall, prevents fundamental ontology, in principle, from preparing the horizon for an interrogation of the meaning of Being overall.
