After forty years of scholarship that has carefully pawed over the data on which the research effort reported in this book was based, and after the gradual publication, in somewhat parallel sequence, of a major portion of Heidegger's Collected Works (the Gesamptausgabe) that contained prodigious amounts of material relevant to this research but inaccessible to the writer when it was undertaken, any serious effort to "revise" the original text in preparation for its U.S. publication in a more

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... dentfriendly form than the original is, as a practical endeavor, simply not feasible. One would have to start all over again. What does seem feasible, however, as a way of introducing the text to a new generation of readers, is to briefly discuss a single theme, characteristic of (and central to) the book's entire argument, that may suggest the sense and continuing relevance of the work as a whole. It will be clear to anyone familiar with Heidegger scholarship over these years that the apparent difference between the philosophical style of an early Heidegger (for example, the author of Being and Time), which in the following study I labeled "Heidegger I," and that of a much later period, which I designated roughly as "Heidegger II," became a bone of contention among Heidegger's interpreters and provoked more sound and fury I The substance of this essay first appeared as "From Phenomenology Through Thought to a Festschrift.