Translated by Pete Ferreira
24
The publication of the courses that Heidegger gave at Marburg from winter semester 1923/24 until summer semester 1928 allows us to elucidate the evolution of his thought in the years immediately preceding the publication of Being and Time, that is, in one of his most intense and fecund periods. In the context of the confrontation with the tradition that we are considering here, this period is of special interest, because Heidegger measures himself against of the great moments of traditional fundamental ontological thought, namely, (in the order in which he considers them), with Husserl, with Aristotle and with Kant (and also with Thomas Aquinas, with Suarez, Descartes, and Leibniz).
All these confrontations, and especially the confrontation with Aristotle, take place within the horizon of Heidegger's attempt to question the assumptions of traditional ontology and to pave the way for a radical re-foundation. This questioning and this re-foundation are carried out, on the one hand, by revealing the leveling effect of the metaphysical understanding of being as presence (linked to an understanding of time that privileges the present); and second, by identifying in the specific mode of being of human life, that is in the being-there, the structural foundation for a radical restating of the problem of being.