nevertheless manages to touch on most of these themes in his detour into the first full-scale, and self-consciously phenemenological, destruction of the history of ontology and its logic focused on the key intermediatory between Aristotle and Husserl, Descartes. This change in the course outline was first announced just before the Christmas break, giving the students ample time to acquire their unexpectedly requisite Descartes texts. Heidegger thus supplies tangible proof for his repeated insistence on the inseparability of the systematic and the historical in phenomenology.
But of interest to us in our present genealogical context is the development of the first point above, which represents the very first of several attempts to develop the meaning of phenomeno-logy from its two Greek roots. It is indicative especially of the incorporation of Aristotelian insights, sometimes against Aristotle, into Heidegger's own conception of phenomenology. Aristotle is pitted against Aristotle, for example, in Heidegger's opening remarks urging his students to adopt a more "phronetic" attitude toward their chosen science, contrary to the traditional equation of scientific comportment with θεωρεῖν, intuitive comportment, which in fact places us more at the finished end of science rather than at its interrogative beginnings. Instead, he recommends the restless passion for the genuine questions of a particular science ensconced in its situational presuppositions, and acceptance of those presuppositions as one's very own, contrary to the "utopia" of presuppositionlessness, which is the most dangerous presupposition of all. Only when each of us, in his particular place and chosen science with its particular questions, has learned that here he is encountering himself, does he come to understand what science is. It is not a matter of speculation within a system but of becoming a "native" in an ongoing science by confronting its particular matters and resolutely seizing the particular opportunities which it transmits to us.
As the old Heidegger has led us to expect (in the Niemeyer Festgabe), the etymological approach to the term "phenomeno-logy" restores its field of research, modernized by Husserl into the domain of consciousness, its acts and its objects, back to the more originary Greek "Dasein of the world and the being of life." However, it is not so much the aletheic lead (so in the letter to Richardson) but more this sheer "phenomenal" route which first leads us to the issue of pure presence. It does not "dawn" on us, as the old Heidegger appears to suggest, in the guise of the lowly Anwesen (οὐσία) of real estate and household goods, but rather as that dominating presence of the Greek world, the overwhelming Anwesenheit (παρουσία: De Anima 418bl7) of the sky.
First employed in the school of Wolff in the eighteenth century, the term "phenomenology" referred to the theory of appearances, that is, to the means by which knowing could avoid appearance as sham. How