structural:summarization
The history of being

The idea of asking about being may be traced back via Aristotle to Parmenides. Heidegger claims to revive this question of being that had been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness extending into the Age of Enlightenment, as well as modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of the question, Heidegger spends considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander.

In his later philosophy, Heidegger attempts to reconstruct the "history of being" in order to show how the different epochs in the history of philosophy were dominated by different conceptions of being. His goal is to retrieve the original experience of being present in the early Greek thought that was covered up by later philosophers.

According to W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, Heidegger believed "the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides, which lies at the origin of philosophy, was falsified and misinterpreted" by Plato and Aristotle, thus tainting all of subsequent Western philosophy. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger states, "Among the most ancient Greek thinkers, it is Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek misinterpretation in the course of Western history, and who nevertheless in more recent times has provided the strongest impulses toward redisclosing what is authentically Greek."

Charles Guignon writes that Heidegger aims to correct this misunderstanding by reviving Presocratic notions of being with an emphasis on "understanding the way beings show up in (and as) an unfolding happening or event." Guignon adds that "we might call this alternative outlook 'event ontology. ' "