Martin Heidegger
Fundamental ontology

According to scholar Taylor Carman, traditional ontology asks "Why is there anything?", whereas Heidegger's fundamental ontology asks "What does it mean for something to be?" Heidegger's ontology "is fundamental relative to traditional ontology in that it concerns what any understanding of entities necessarily presupposes, namely, our understanding of that by virtue of which entities are entities".

This line of inquiry is "central to Heidegger's philosophy". He accuses the Western philosophical tradition of mistakenly trying to understand being as such as if it were an ultimate entity. Heidegger modifies traditional ontology by focusing instead on the meaning of being. This kind of ontological inquiry, he claims, is required to understand the basis of our understanding, scientific and otherwise.

In short, before asking what exists, Heidegger contends that people must first examine what "to exist" even means.
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