Philosophy is at once historical and programmatic, its roots always planted in tradition even as it moves into new, uncharted terrain. There are undeniably great works all along the spectrum, some immersed in intellectual history at the expense of contemporary problems, some fixated on current problems, forgetful of their histories. But philosophy misunderstands itself at either extreme.

In writing this book, I have tried to steer a middle course between Scylla and Charybdis. The result is a reading of Being and Time that is, I hope, neither antiquarian nor anachronistic. I have focused on some problems at the expense of others, many of them fed by discussions in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, though I have tried to deal with them within what strike me as the conceptual horizons proper to Heidegger's thinking. The book is therefore neither a commentary on Being and Time nor simply a Heideggerian approach to some independently defined philosophical domain.

It is instead an account of the substantive and methodological role of the concept of interpretation (Auslegung) in Heidegger's project of “fundamental ontology” in Being and Time. Interpretation runs like a thread through the entire fabric of the text, and I have tried to point up its philosophical importance for the existential analytic of Dasein. Substantively, Heidegger maintains that interpretation – by which he means explicit understanding – is definitive of human existence: Human beings have an understanding of what it means to be, and that understanding is or can be made explicit, at least in part.