Acknowledgments
I have been working on the issues discussed in this book for over a decade, and as a
consequence I have many, many people to thank for their helpful comments and
incisive criticisms, each of which has helped me in ways that are difficult to enumer-
ate. Philosophy is never conducted in a vacuum. I know that I have been fortunate to
benefit from the advice of so many people, and I am grateful for that.
The seeds of this project began in 2002, when Gary Matthews led a reading group
on Heidegger’sBeing and Time. I was a graduate student at UMass Amherst at the
time; it was an excellent place for both contemporary metaphysics and the history
of philosophy but not a place where Heidegger’s texts couldfind much sympathy.
But Gary had an expansive view of philosophy, and he thought that it was an
important text, and that we would benefit from our exposure to it. I don’t remem-
ber who all participated in the group. Jason Raibley, Marcy Lascano, Jack Hanson,
myself, and maybe a few others. (Myfirst copy ofBeing and Timewas given to me
by Jason and Marcy, with the inscription,“Inhopesthatyourfutureinquiries
into Being will be truly ontological.”) In order to make headway on the text,
I wrote down about thirty questions that I would ask Heidegger to answer, and
discussed them with Gary. What a gentle, patient, and wise man Gary was. He is
still sorely missed.
In the spring of 2006, I was tasked with teaching early twentieth-century philoso-
phy to a group of graduate and undergraduate students at Syracuse University. With
Gary’s example in mind, I decided to cover as many differentfigures as I could cram
in the semester and to use only primary texts, including selections fromBeing and
Time. Most of the undergraduates dropped the class quickly. But the graduate
students were great! One of the pedagogical issues I faced was how to make
Heidegger’s question of the meaning of being feel like a genuine issue to a class of
analytic philosophers. My mostly successful attempt spurred me to write up several
of the disconnected notes I had amassed on Heidegger into something presentable.
By the summer of 2006, I produced a manuscript consisting of about 40,000 words
on the metaphysics ofBeing and Time. A significant portion of this manuscript was a
version of chapter 1 of this book. (Two other chunks of this manuscript have since
been published as independent articles. I hope to return to this project sometime in
the future.) Thankfully, I was able to talk about my Heidegger manuscript with Gary.
Later, Jonathan Schaffer provided me with detailed written feedback and encourage-
ment. I also benefited from discussions of the Heidegger manuscript with Jason
Turner and Ted Sider.
There have been many times when I feared I would neverfinishthismanuscript.
(As I type these very words, I have this fear!) Joshua Spencer provided much needed