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Two key developments characterize the trajectory of Heidegger’s thought from Being and Time (1927) to Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38). First, Heidegger’s approach to his main topic undergoes a “reversal” or turn (Kehre). This turn basically corresponds to a structural reversibility or reciprocity between the sense of being (being2) and Dasein in the later Heidegger’s articulation of beyng (being3) as event (Ereignis). Second, a new, quadruple oppositional schema emerges, one that will ultimately become the figure of the fourfold (Geviert). This schema can be regarded as the later Heidegger’s main attempt to schematize the relationship between being as meaningful presence (being1) and being as the background or meaningcontext of presence (being2) within the comprehensive articulation of beyng (being3) as ontological difference. In Chapter 6, we will see that these two topics—the reciprocity of being2 and the human being and the differential relation between being1 and being2—also constitute the two basic aspects of Heidegger’s mature account, in Identity and Difference (1957), of being3 as complicated presence.
At the end of Division I.2 of Being and Time (§ 83), the basic methodological tenet of fundamental ontology is reconsidered, but now in the form of a question: is the analytic of Dasein as the exemplary being the only, or even the appropriate, approach to the sense of being?
[. . .] [P]hilosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, taking its departure from the hermeneutics of Dasein, which, as the analytic of existence, has made fast the guideline for all
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