Fundamental ontology

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger made the distinction between ontical and ontological. Ontical refers to a particular area of Being, whereas ontological ought to refer to Being as such. The history of ontology in Western Philosophy is, in Heidegger's terms, properly speaking, ontical, and ontology ought to designate fundamental ontology. He says "Ontological inquiry is indeed more primordial, as over against the ontical inquiry of the positive sciences". It is from this distinction he developed his project of fundamental ontology (German: Fundamental ontologie).

The project of fundamental ontology appeared as a result of Heidegger's decision to re-interpret phenomenology, which he had developed earlier in collaboration with his mentor Husserl, using a neat set of ontological categories.

For this project Heidegger had to look for new terminologies by means of which it would become possible for him adequately to represent the structure of his new brand of phenomenology. The significantly large change in terminology Heidegger made in the project also resulted in a reconsideration and redefinition of many traditional concepts. For instance, the thesis that a phenomenon is the essence of a thing could not be articulated by using traditional concepts alone; in fact, Heidegger consistently refused to use these concepts in their original (i.e. Husserl's) senses. He re-interpreted such basic philosophical categories as "subject", "object", "spirit", "body", "consciousness", "reality" and others with a new emphasis on Being (German: ), showing their inadequacy for his new philosophical explorations.

Moreover, Heidegger went on to separate his pursuit of "ontology" from the kinds of inquiry that previous researches of "essence" had conducted under the same label, which henceforth, according to Heidegger, should be engaged only in particular fields of science. For Heidegger, the ontical forms of research conducted by scientists presuppose the regional-ontological, which in turn presupposes the fundamental-ontological. As he expresses it:

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