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Few thinkers take their initial ideas or insights through different stages of development without some deepening, change or extension. The unfolding of the initial insight is not clearly foreseen at the beginning. This is especially true for philosophical thinking which wants to work back toward its starting point. The tendency is to continually renew the initial insight in the light of further development. This tendency to renewal in the starting point can easily lead superficial readers to stand detached and at a distance from the thinker's development and accuse him of a radical change in relation to his insight and starting point. A victim on the contemporary philosophical scene of this accusation of radical change is Martin Heidegger. Some would see a radical change in his philosophy from the early stage of Sein und Zeit ¹ to his later writings, instead of seeing how he entered upon his path, continued to make headway along that path, and focused more explicitly on his initial question of the meaning of Being.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-1661-2_1

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