In Being and Time, Heidegger announced the “Task of Destroying the History of Ontology” in order to free what had remained “unthought” in Western metaphysics. The unpublished part of that work was to be titled “Basic Features of a Phenomenological Destruction of the History of Ontology. According to the Guiding Thread of the Problem of Temporality.” This latest work in the Reiner Schürmann Selected Writings and Lecture Notes series aims to carry out Heidegger’s plan. The destruction, or, as it is later called, the deconstruction of metaphysics, has a negative side—the peeling off, or the archeology, of metaphysical history by means of the guiding thread of the question of Being—and a positive side—“retrieval” of the original experience of Being in ancient Greek philosophy.
 
“The destruction has no other intent than to win back the original experience of metaphysics through a deconstruction of those conceptions which have become current and empty.” The purpose of taking to pieces the fabric of Western metaphysics is to show how at each important stage “the question of the meaning of Being has not only remained unattended to or inadequately raised, but that it has become quite forgotten in spite of all our interest in 'metaphysics'.”

Reiner Schürmann (1941–93) was a German philosopher, professor, and director of the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Francesco Guercio is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. His doctoral research has focused on late Reiner Schürmann’s published works and unpublished lecture notes—which he is also translating into Italian. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback is full professor of philosophy at Södertörn University (Sweden). She is the author of English of Time in Exile: In conversation with Heidegger, Blanchot and Clarice Lispector and coeditor of The End of the World, Dis-orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity, and Being with the Without. She is also the Brazilian translator of Heidegger’s Being and Time and other philosophical and poetical works.