Sein und Zeit

Being and Time

Cover of the first edition
Author	Martin Heidegger
Original title	Sein und Zeit
Translator	1962: John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson 1996: Joan Stambaugh
Country	Germany
Language	German
Subject	Being
Published	1927 (in German) 1962: SCM Press 1996: State University of New York Press 2008: Harper Perennial Modern Thought
Pages	589 (Macquarrie and Robinson translation) 482 (Stambaugh translation)
ISBN	(Blackwell edition) 978-1-4384-3276-2 (State University of New York Press edition)
Followed by	Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit) is a 1927 book by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in which the author seeks to analyse the concept of Being. Heidegger maintains that this has fundamental importance for philosophy and that, since the time of the Ancient Greeks, philosophy has avoided the question, turning instead to the analysis of particular beings. Heidegger attempts to revive ontology through a reawakening of the question of the meaning of being. He approaches this through a fundamental ontology that is a preliminary analysis of the being of the being to whom the question of being is important, i.e., Dasein, or the human being in the abstract.

Heidegger wrote that Being and Time was made possible by his study of Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900–1901), and it is dedicated to Husserl "in friendship and admiration". Although Heidegger did not complete the project outlined in the introduction, Being and Time remains his most important work. It was immediately recognized as an original and groundbreaking philosophical work, and later became a focus of debates and controversy, and a profound influence on 20th-century philosophy, particularly existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and the enactivist approach to cognition. Being and Time has been described as the most influential version of existential philosophy, and Heidegger's achievements in the work have been compared to those of Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812–1816). Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness (1943) under the influence of Heidegger.