William Large’s Heidegger’s Being and Time: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide poses a single sustained question: through what disciplined ordering of beginnings can a reader unfamiliar with Heidegger’s idiom enter Being and Time without either capitulating to its surface difficulty or domesticating its ontological aims into a manageable epistemology? The book’s governing ambition is to construct such an entry by deliberately reorganising the order of explanation: it teaches the reader how the question of Being is posed before it teaches the reader what the work says, and it does so under the methodological wager that an English-language commentary descended from the French reception of Heidegger can illuminate dimensions of the work which the Anglo-pragmatist tradition has tended to leave shaded. Its distinctive value as an object of study lies in its dual fidelity to pedagogical accessibility and to philosophical commitment.
The first thing that strikes any close reader of Large’s volume is that its declared modesty—its insistence that no commentary can substitute for the reading of the text itself, that it is meant only to provide a helping hand, that it does not engage in any detailed way with the scholarship surrounding Being and Time—operates not as a disclaimer but as a methodological lever. By renouncing scholarly contestation in the body of the text, while preserving it almost entirely in the endnotes, Large produces a stratification that the reader must learn to inhabit. The main exposition unfolds as if the question of Heidegger’s meaning were settled enough to be taught; the endnotes hold open a parallel space in which the meaning is unsettled, contested, and tensioned by figures Large names without dwelling on them—Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, Critchley, Grondin, Barash, and the long shadow of the French reception generally. The result is a commentary that performs two registers at once: an exposition addressed to the first-time reader and a quiet annotation addressed to those for whom Heidegger has already become a problem. Large signals this by name when he notes that the book differs from other introductions in coming from a serious engagement with the French Heideggerians, that it indicates the debates within this reception in the endnotes rather than the main text, and that it keeps most of this material out of the main exposition while explaining Heidegger’s argument as well as he can. The textual division is therefore an interpretive operator: the endnotes are not supplementary information but the place where the work’s commitments are kept honest.
The series-frame that conditions this stratification is itself philosophically significant. The Edinburgh Philosophical Guides, edited by Douglas Burnham, are described in the preface as designed to help readers new to philosophical classics encounter the antique or artificial style of those works, the twists and turns of their arguments, and their unfamiliar vocabulary. The preface speaks of enabling readers to make their own judgements, to join the great dialogue of philosophy rather than remain well-informed eavesdroppers. This declared pedagogical posture establishes the constraints within which Large operates—correspondence with the way these texts are actually taught in universities, accompaniment to the primary reading rather than substitution for it, and study aids that allow university-level essays or examination answers to be written. Large accepts the constraints and inflects them: he opens his own introduction by adopting the series’ modesty, then immediately distinguishes his book by appealing to its different background, then equally immediately disposes of the biographical introduction expected of an entry-level commentary by declaring that the meaning of a philosophy cannot be told by the facts of its author’s life. The single exception he admits—Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi Party—is reframed not as a biographical aside but as the occasion for a philosophical claim about the absence of ethics in Being and Time, an absence whose seriousness, he tells us, was named by Levinas. The reframing matters because it announces, in advance of any exposition, that Heidegger’s ontology will be read as carrying a real philosophical debt that the work itself does not pay.
The translation choice—Macquarrie and Robinson over Stambaugh, with the abbreviation BT used throughout—is reported in a single page of front matter, but its significance is more than bibliographic. Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation enshrined the capitalised Being for the verbal sense and the lower-case being for the nominal sense, a typographic convention that allows the so-called ontological difference to be visually present on every line of the commentary. Stambaugh, who renders the verbal sense without capitalisation, leaves this difference to context. Large’s adherence to the older translation is therefore continuous with his own claim, made later in the glossary, that there is something faintly absurd about explaining the difference between Being and being in a glossary at all, since this difference is the aim of Heidegger’s whole philosophical life. The choice of translation is the choice of a typography of the question.
The deepest methodological wager of the book—and the one most clearly inherited from the French reception—appears in the construction of Chapter One, the chapter on Historical Context. Large does not begin where Being and Time begins, with the question of Being announced through Plato’s Sophist; he begins with Husserl, then turns to the lectures of History of the Concept of Time, and only afterwards approaches the introduction of Being and Time itself. The justification offered is twofold. Being and Time opens, as Large writes, almost as though there were no context, as though it had dropped from the heavens. And the question of Being cannot be understood through its answer; it must first be understood through its method, which is phenomenology. The phenomenological method has to be grasped before the question can even be posed correctly. The reader who begins inside Being and Time will have her expectations distort the possibility of getting anything worthwhile from the reading, since she will assume that to understand the question of Being is to have its definition, and she will then conclude that Heidegger fails to supply one.
What Large draws from Husserl is precisely calibrated to what he needs for the reading of Being and Time. Phenomenology is presented as, first of all, a refusal of metaphysics and academic philosophy, the famous return to the things themselves; then as the doctrine of intentionality, which displaces the metaphysical picture of a worldless subject burdened with the problem of breaking out to the world; then as the discovery that consciousness is always consciousness of something, that there is no subject and object separate from one another, that the world is not something out there since we are our world. Large insists on the elementary, almost classroom-level character of this exposition. He stops short of presenting Husserl as a doctrinal predecessor and refuses to give him for his own sake; what is wanted is his impact on the young Heidegger. The guide here is the lecture course History of the Concept of Time, which Large describes as the first draft of Being and Time and which, on the testimony of Heidegger’s students, presents his thought in the most direct and vivid way. The choice of this text as the primary key to Being and Time is itself a marker of Large’s distance from the Dreyfusian style of commentary; it is consistent with the French preference for reading Heidegger through his lecture corpus and through the pre-history of Being and Time.
The substance Large extracts from the History of the Concept of Time is the diagnosis that what has been left unquestioned in phenomenology until then is the question of Being—not as an alternative to phenomenology but as that which phenomenology presupposes and to which it alone is properly adequate. The break with Husserl is staged through what Large carefully labels an immanent critique. Husserl is shown to have imported a metaphysical meaning of consciousness from the history of philosophy (essentially Cartesian) while failing to apply phenomenology’s own maxim to consciousness itself; the result is that the Being of that being which is conscious is taken for granted by phenomenology, even though phenomenology cannot function without it. The conclusion Large derives is that Heidegger’s method must be a double reduction: a reduction that goes behind what Husserl’s reduction takes for granted, the life of the individual consciousness, in order to uncover a more fundamental ontological basis to any possible epistemology. This formulation is among the book’s most concentrated theses. It conditions everything that follows. The phrase double reduction names the structural relation of Heidegger to Husserl: a fidelity to the spirit of phenomenology that proceeds by violating the letter of the original reduction.
A particularly important pivot in this section is Large’s treatment of the etymological strand in Heidegger. Heidegger’s etymologies, he claims, are not philological exercises and do not aspire to dictionary accuracy. They are designed to dislodge habituated readings of metaphysical vocabulary by making us think again. The etymology of phenomenon as that which shows itself in itself—rather than as appearance in the Kantian sense of object of consciousness—is read as a recovery of a more primordial sense of the word, one for which appearance and concealment, indication and symptom, are derivative. The etymology of logos as making clear, rather than as judgment or predication, is read similarly: judgment is dependent on the prior making-clear that is the act of speech itself. The combination of these two etymologies yields Heidegger’s initial conception of phenomenology, which Large quotes with the formula that phenomenology is to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. The conclusion Large extracts is that every phenomenology is ontology: phenomenology looks to the meaning of the Being of phenomena. And the formula’s reflexive movement—phenomena are those things that can be brought into the light, but their Being is hidden and must be sought—prepares the structure of the analytic of Dasein, since the only being whose Being can be brought into the light by phenomenology is the being for whom Being is at all an issue.
The exposition then moves into Being and Time proper, but the order of its movements is again carefully calibrated. Large insists that the question of Being must be experienced as strange and peculiar; that we thought we knew what this question meant, and now we are no longer sure. He grounds this in the ordinary uses of is—the sky is blue, I am happy—through which we already imply a meaning of Being even where we cannot state it. From this ordinary use he develops the Aristotelian setting of the problem: that Being cannot be defined in the manner of genus and species, since it is common to every being yet picks out no specific difference; that this transcendence of Being could be taken to mean either that Being is the emptiest of concepts or, alternatively, that Being is the most self-evident; and that both conclusions, far from settling the question, only restate the perplexity. The decisive move Large attributes to Heidegger is the recovery of the question’s life from its scholastic petrification. The ordinary understanding of Being is the place where the question retains a foothold; the failure of metaphysical definition is the evidence that an alternative form of access must be found.
The form of that access is laid out in the formal structure of questioning that Large translates into three elements—what is asked about, what is interrogated, what is to be discovered—and to which he attaches the three answers eventually given: the meaning of Being; the existence of Dasein; time as the horizon of ontology. The schema is, in Large’s hands, more than a heuristic. It governs the architectural design of the rest of his exposition. The question of Being is to be approached through a determinate kind of being, which can only be the questioning being itself; this requires a justification of the ontic priority of Dasein, which is in turn its ontological priority; and it requires that the question’s terminal horizon—time—be exposed in such a way as to overturn the metaphysical conception of time as the ossified succession of nows that Aristotle’s analysis introduced and that Western philosophy has inherited as a self-evident image. The triadic schema is therefore a compositional principle, and Large keeps returning to it as a means of reorienting the reader at moments of conceptual density.
The introduction of Dasein in Large’s exposition is not staged through translation. He emphasises, somewhat against the grain of much Anglo introductory writing, that Dasein in ordinary German just means existence, and more specifically human existence, and that the philosophical reason Heidegger uses it lies elsewhere than in lexical singularity. The reason is the ontological character of human existence: the fact that for this being its Being is an issue for it. Large delineates this through a series of low-temperature examples. A dog does not worry about being a dog; it just is one. My existence, by contrast, is something I have to take a stand upon, even when the stand I take is the drift of boredom or indecision. The distinction that follows—between the existentiell, an individual choice that can be as minor as deciding to go to town in the afternoon or as major as becoming a physicist, and the existential, the underlying structure of Being and Time‘s analytic—is presented as a piece of disciplined conceptual hygiene. The existential is the form, the existentiell the particular instance; the form has no content of its own; and the form is the proper concern of fundamental ontology. The categorical, by contrast, names the way of Being of those beings Dasein encounters in the world, and the seductive philosophical error is to take the categorical for the existential, applying to Dasein conceptual instruments shaped for things.
It is in the unfolding of this distinction that Large signals one of his most important commitments: the existential is more fundamental than the categorical, and Heidegger’s reversal of the inherited priority is the centre of gravity of Being and Time‘s entire analytic. Knowledge is a way we relate to things in attempting to comprehend them, but this relation is itself a particular way of existing in the world, and so the question of existence is more fundamental, ontologically speaking, than the problem of knowledge. The thesis arrives in Large’s text without polemic, but its consequences are far-reaching. It allows him to read the entire metaphysical and scientific tradition as an inverted ontology—a derivative way of being projected as the primary one—and it furnishes the conceptual machinery for what will become, three chapters later, the existential reduction of Cartesian extension to a regional ontology of the present-at-hand.
The transition to the destruction of the history of ontology, which closes Large’s exposition of the introduction of Being and Time, restates this thesis in historical terms. The metaphysical tradition is not an external repository of dusty books but a force that conditions the very sense of ourselves in the present. The destruction is twofold: a negative movement that exposes how this tradition has distorted the meaning of Being, and a positive movement that finds within the same tradition resources for the renewal of the question. Large lingers on the positive moment, and it is here that the French inflection of his reading is most explicit. He marks, by name and in the endnotes, that this twofold method is the origin of Derridean deconstruction. He directs the reader to Derrida’s Letter to a Japanese Friend and to Critchley’s Ethics of Deconstruction for the further development of this lineage. The reference is brief but consequential. It tells the reader that, on Large’s reading, the analytical step that allows Being and Time to read Descartes and Kant against themselves is the same step that, transformed and reoriented, becomes Derrida’s reading of metaphysics tout court. The pedagogical understatement is performing serious philosophical work.
The substantive content of the destruction, as Large presents it, is the discovery that every ontology of the philosophical tradition has been an interpretation of time, and specifically of time as presence. Heidegger’s allusion to Kant is given centrality: time is what acts as the bridge between understanding and sensibility in Kant’s first Critique, but Kant’s subject is still the subject of the cogito, and his ontology a repetition of Descartes’, whose own ontology, despite his protestations, is a repetition of Scholastic thought rooted in Aristotle. The prejudice handed down through this lineage is that Being is to be understood as presence, and that present-to-hand availability is the implicit model of beings. The aim of the second division of Being and Time—which Large will reach much later in his exposition—is to displace this temporal prejudice by showing that the time of existence is the time of the future, not the time of the present, and that an ontology of time must therefore be wholly reordered.
A characteristic ambivalence appears here. Large announces that Heidegger’s outline of Being and Time falls naturally out of the structure of questioning he has been reconstructing—analytic of Dasein, interpretation of time in relation to this analytic, meaning of Being in general in terms of time, followed by the destruction of the histories of Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle—and then immediately turns this announcement against itself by observing that what readers have in their hands is only a fragment. The second part was never published. The three divisions of the second part appear, in lectures or later publications, after Being and Time. What is genuinely missing is the third division of the first part, Time and Being. Large refuses to read this as a failure that disqualifies the book. The point of philosophy, he says, is questioning more than answering. But he also refuses to read it as an accident. The reason the third division is missing is, he suggests, that Heidegger’s own interpretation of the relation between Dasein and the meaning of Being remained too enmeshed in the tradition he was trying to escape. The argument of Being and Time, he writes, in a curious way repeats the traditional transcendental arguments that find the source of the world in the subject. The tension is sharp: Dasein, the historically situated being, is asked to perform a transcendental function. How can Dasein be both historical and transcendental? Large flags the question, refers it to the closing pages of Foucault’s The Order of Things, and then suspends it. The suspension is itself a piece of philosophical strategy. It tells the reader that the unity of Being and Time is not assumed and that the book will be read in such a way as to bring its own internal pressure into view.
The thematic sequence that follows—Being-in-the-world, world, Descartes and spatiality—is the densest part of Large’s commentary on the first division and the place where his fidelity to BT’s wording is closest. He treats in as the methodological hinge: not the in of containment, as water is in a glass, but the existential in whose translation he carefully discusses. The translation being alongside is registered, but Large notes Dreyfus’s preference for being at home and treats the latter as more accurate, since the connotation of one thing being next to another contaminates the spatial reading he is trying to displace. He uses the simple proposition in as an extended phenomenological exercise, returning to it in the chapter on others, in the description of Dasein’s spatiality, in the discussion of de-severance, and in the analysis of authentic temporality. The recurrence is not redundancy. Each time the in is reformulated, the conceptual content thickens; the question of how Dasein occupies its world acquires further determinations.
Mineness, Jemeinigkeit, is approached through possibility rather than property. The acorn is the recurring counter-example: the acorn’s potentiality to become an oak is indifferent across acorns and is therefore not a possibility in Heidegger’s sense; an acorn cannot relate to its own possibilities, cannot say of any of them that they are its own. Dasein, by contrast, can both own and disown its possibilities, and the discrimination between authenticity and inauthenticity—rendered through the German eigentlich, derived from eigen, meaning own—is keyed to this capacity. Large emphasises, against any moralising temptation, that the distinction is ontological rather than moral. Authentic existence is not a virtue to be achieved; it is one possibility of Dasein’s way of Being, and the alternative possibility (which Heidegger calls inauthentic) is not failure but the default condition of Dasein in its absorption with the world. The temptation to read Heidegger as a critic of mass society or as a reactionary cultural diagnostician is identified and refused. The they-self is a way to be me; it does not contradict the existential thesis that existence is always mine; the self is not given but won.
Within the same span Large develops the structure of equipment. He carefully follows BT’s in-order-to and towards-which, treating each piece of equipment as belonging to a referential totality rather than to a collection of present things. The hammer’s Being is disclosed in hammering rather than in the contemplative inspection of the hammer; the door I walk through every day is invisible to me until it does not open; the television and the remote control and the sofa are equipmentally absorbed into the activity of an evening rather than perceptually thematised. The conclusion Large extracts—and to which he keeps returning across the rest of the book—is that the world becomes visible only in the breaks of equipmental absorption. Phenomenology, in this register, is precisely the making explicit of what occurs in these breaks. The position of the broken television is presented as the methodological analogue of the position of philosophy in the history of metaphysics: in both cases, something invisible becomes visible only when something familiar fails.
The chapter on Descartes and spatiality is read by Large as the only completed instance, within the published Being and Time, of the destruction of the history of ontology that the unwritten second part would have systematised. This makes the section unusually weighty. The Cartesian metaphysics of extension is shown to be a confusion of regional and general ontology: it takes the scientific description of things—their mathematical extension—as if it were the ontology of the world, when what it has actually achieved is the description of one type of thing within the world. The fundamental categorial assumption underlying this confusion, Large insists, is the metaphysics of presence: Being interpreted as that simple awareness of something present-to-hand in its sheer present-to-hand. This interpretation traces back to Parmenides; Descartes is therefore not the revolutionary he believed himself to be, but a continuation of the long metaphysical lineage that began with the early Greeks. The existential analysis of space that Heidegger offers in response is built on the distinction between de-severance (Ent-fernung, literally the taking-away of distance) and directionality; spatial distance becomes a matter of Dasein’s concern rather than a geometric property. The laptop in front of me is closer than the spectacles on the end of my nose, even though the spectacles are objectively nearer.
Large pauses here to register a striking phenomenological observation that recurs through the book: that Being and Time already contains, in compressed form, the seeds of the later Heideggerian treatment of technology. The radio passage—where Heidegger speaks of de-severance and the conquest of remoteness in connection with the early twentieth-century technological transformation of everyday space—is treated by Large as the kernel of what later becomes the analysis of enframing in The Question Concerning Technology. The endnote here is, again, where the philosophical inheritance is registered: nature in Being and Time, Large suggests, has already begun to appear as material for work—the wood as forest of timber, the mountain as a quarry of rock, the river as water-power, the wind as wind in the sails—even though Being and Time itself does not yet develop this thought into a critical philosophy of technology. The continuity between the early and the late Heidegger is thereby registered without being thematised, and the introductory commentary doubles, almost imperceptibly, as an indication of the trajectory of Heidegger’s entire post-1927 corpus.
The reading of others, which follows, is again pitched to displace a misunderstanding the reader is presumed to bring to Being and Time. The problem of other minds is treated as a piece of metaphysical pathology produced by the wrong conception of the in. If Dasein is conceived on the model of a closed entity present-to-hand, the existence of other Daseins becomes a problem of bridge-building between sealed interiorities; if Dasein is conceived as Being-in-the-world, the problem is dissolved before it can be posed, since others are already there in the very equipmental relations through which Dasein has a world. Large’s analytical point of departure is the simple observation that the boundaries of a field I walk alongside in the countryside, even when nobody is there, are already the trace of someone’s concern. Being-with is not a property added to Dasein but a constituent of Dasein’s existential structure. Solicitude (Fürsorge) is then differentiated from concern (Besorgen): concern is the proper term for Dasein’s relation to equipment, solicitude for its relation to others. Solicitude has, on Large’s reading, two positive modes: the substitutive mode in which I stand in for the other and absorb her possibilities, and the freeing mode in which I release the other for her own possibilities. The contrast acquires, late in the book, an ethical resonance that Large does not develop in the main text but does indicate in the endnotes: the question of whether the freeing mode of solicitude is sufficient as an ethics, or whether (as Levinas argues) the relation to the other requires a deeper inversion of priorities that Being and Time never achieves.
The discussion of the they-self, das Man, has the same shape as the discussion of mineness: a sustained polemic against the moralising misreading and an insistence on the ontological status of the description. The they-self is not a sociological category and the analysis of it is not a Kulturkritik of modernity; it is a description of how Dasein is, structurally, in its everydayness. Large’s most explicit refusal is directed against the interpretation of Heidegger as a reactionary conservative bemoaning the decline of individuality. The text’s recurrent qualifications—that to be a they-self is a way to be me, that the self is something that must be won out of the anonymous background of everyday existence, that singularity is not the same as individuality if individuality is understood as being unusual—are read by Large as the formal markers of the ontological neutrality of the description. The they-self is the soil from which the self can grow; it is what Dasein has to wrest itself from in order to become its own; it does not have a moral colour of its own. The aside about reading, seeing, and judging about literature and art as they see and judge is presented as a description rather than a verdict, even if Large concedes that the descriptive material does later admit of social commentary.
The treatment of moods, understanding, and language continues this discipline of distinguishing description from valuation, but it also introduces what Large explicitly identifies as the trick of Being and Time‘s phenomenology: that moods are not subjective colourings of an otherwise neutral cognitive grasp but the ontological mode through which Dasein’s world as a whole is revealed. Cognition is restricted to particular objects; mood reveals the world. The reformulation, drawn directly from BT, is the precondition for what will become the central role of anxiety in the second division. Large notes here the translational difficulty of Befindlichkeit—the German derives from the everyday expression Wie befinden Sie sich?, how are you, how do you feel—and registers Macquarrie and Robinson’s choice of state-of-mind as cognitively skewed, preferring Dreyfus’s affectedness. The translation choice is once again the carrier of an interpretive commitment: if moods are translated as states of mind, the cognitivist prejudice the analysis is meant to displace is smuggled back into the vocabulary.
Understanding (Verstehen) is then introduced as that mode of Dasein’s being that throws itself into possibilities as projection; interpretation (Auslegung) is the working out of these projected possibilities. Large insists that the working out is pragmatic rather than theoretical, and that the apparent paradox by which Dasein is more than what it is—since as what it is now it is already what it is not, having projected itself forward—is no paradox but the formal mark of Dasein’s existential constitution. The fore-structure of interpretation is presented through the analogy of reading: no reading is presuppositionless; every reading is shaped by prejudices and expectations; the so-called hermeneutic circle is not a vicious circle but the existential condition for the very possibility of understanding. Large here notes, in the endnotes, that this structure is decisive for Gadamer’s Truth and Method, and he reads the ontological hermeneutics of Being and Time as the precursor of philosophical hermeneutics in the post-war German tradition. The reader who has been attending to the parallel French inheritance will note that the same step also feeds, by a different route, into the deconstructive thematisation of the impossibility of presuppositionless reading.
The threefold structure of assertion (Aussage) that follows—pointing-out, predication, communication—operates as the conceptual bridge by which Large connects the analysis of understanding and interpretation to the analysis of truth. Pointing-out is treated as the original sense of logos: letting some thing be seen as itself. Predication is the narrower derivative meaning. Communication is the pragmatic moment in which what is pointed out is rendered such that it can be shared. The argument is that the ready-to-hand always precedes the present-to-hand as the proper site of pointing-out, and that assertion as predication is the stepping back that converts the hammer-in-use into the hammer-as-subject-with-predicates. Large names this as the conceptual heart of Heidegger’s critique of the philosophical tradition: the tradition has illegitimately reversed the ontological priority of the ready-to-hand over the present-to-hand, taking the derivative cognitive relation as the fundamental one and the original equipmental relation as a degraded mode of cognition. The history of philosophy is, on this reading, the protracted institutionalisation of this reversal.
It is at precisely this moment in the exposition that Large performs his most striking compositional decision: he leaps forward, out of order, to the analysis of truth in section forty-four of Being and Time, well before reaching the second division. The leap is justified by the conceptual proximity of truth to assertion and to understanding. Truth, Large argues, is the deepening of the analyses of moods, understanding, and language that he has just been pursuing; postponing it to its actual position in the second division would interrupt the conceptual continuity for the sake of textual fidelity. The decision marks, more clearly than any other compositional move in the book, Large’s commitment to order of explanation over order of exposition. He is not paraphrasing Being and Time‘s order; he is rebuilding its argument in the order in which it can be most clearly understood.
Truth, on Large’s reconstruction, is presented through a doubled methodological strategy that mirrors the methodology of Being and Time as a whole: historical and phenomenological. The historical movement reminds the reader that the conception of truth as agreement comes from a tradition (Aristotelian, in its first formulation, but watered down as it passed through Western metaphysics) that has always had a more ambiguous understanding of truth. The phenomenological movement attempts to describe the experience of truth as disclosure, thereby loosening the assumptions of the tradition. The example Large dwells on is the crooked picture: someone with her back to the wall makes the assertion that the picture is crooked, and the question is where truth happens in this transaction. The answer is that truth happens neither in the statement nor in the head of the speaker but at the moment when the picture reveals itself as it is to the person who turns around. Truth is, originally and primordially, the unconcealment of the entity, alétheia; the propositional truth of the statement is the derivative form. Large is careful here to underline what he reports Heidegger himself underlining: that this etymological recovery of alétheia is not word-mysticism but the phenomenological recovery of an experience that the Greek word carried and that the inherited logical conception of truth has covered over.
The consequence Large draws—and the one that justifies his earlier postponement of the analysis of truth—is that the entire conceptual machinery of moods, understanding, language, and assertion is unified by the more fundamental conception of truth as disclosure. The threefold structure of assertion, the practical priority of the ready-to-hand, the hermeneutic fore-structure of interpretation, and the mood-disclosure of world as a whole are all moments of a single ontological event: the there of Dasein as the region within which beings come to manifestation. Dasein exists in the truth in the sense that Dasein is the being whose Being is the disclosing of beings. The further consequence, which Large registers without lingering, is that this conception of truth disallows in principle the realism-idealism debate that has characterised post-Cartesian philosophy: the question of whether the world exists or is a fiction presupposes the categorial Being-of-presence, and dissolves once it is recognised that Dasein is its world and the world is Dasein, ontologically inseparable in the verbal sense of Being. The world is not a substance but a way of Being.
The fourth and most affectively charged stretch of Large’s exposition concerns anxiety, death, guilt, and resoluteness. The opening of this section is unusually direct in tone; Large allows himself a brief, almost confessional cadence that breaks with the previous discipline of neutral exposition. What I cannot face, he writes, is the meaninglessness of my life: I will die, and I will do so alone; what does it matter to the community of the human race that I have died?; while I live, I must fill this meaninglessness with significance, falling back into the world and busying myself with things and others. The tone is significant. It signals that the analysis of anxiety, although ontological in intention, draws its phenomenological evidence from a personal register that the analysis itself thematises and seeks to displace. Anxiety and death, Large insists, are not morbid phenomena; they are, in fact, what make us truly human, and the importance of these analyses for Being and Time lies not in any existentialist pathos but in the methodological function they perform: they answer the question of how Dasein’s Being can become an issue for it, and they make possible the grasp of Dasein’s Being as a whole, which is the precondition for the eventual ontological exhibition of time as the horizon of the meaning of Being.
The treatment of falling—the third constituent of the structure of care, alongside thrownness and projection—is handled with the same anti-moralising care as the treatment of the they-self. Falling is not a sin; it is the very way Dasein is; the in of inauthenticity should not be understood negatively. Dasein is not itself, when it has fallen into the world, but this is just how it is. The ontological neutrality of the description is what allows the description to apply across cultural variations of everydayness rather than to a particular epochal diagnosis. The tripartite structure of falling—idle chatter (Gerede), curiosity (Neugier), and ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit)—is then explicated. Idle chatter is the inauthentic mode of discourse, in which the activity of speech and the words themselves replace the about-which of genuine communication. Curiosity is the inauthentic mode of understanding, in which the gaze moves restlessly from one object to another without ever finding any of them important. Ambiguity is the inauthentic mode of interpretation, in which the confusion of what is worth seeing or hearing or doing leads to the levelling-down of all distinctions.
What Large emphasises—and this is one of the philosophical centres of gravity of his book—is that the description of falling, even in its inauthentic forms, registers a positive ontological phenomenon. Other beings cannot experience the everyday. Dogs and stones cannot fall in Heidegger’s sense. Heidegger is therefore attempting, on Large’s reading, to save the everyday in Being and Time against the long Platonic tradition that has tried to escape it for the realm of eternal ideas. The everyday is not what philosophy must transcend; it is what philosophy must return to. The reversal carries with it an important methodological corollary: the authentic relationship to things and others in the world must have its source in the everyday and not vice versa. Heidegger is not seeking to escape the everyday but to show how the everyday, by virtue of Dasein’s structure, is already implicated in what cannot be experienced as the everyday.
The introduction of the nothing—the most difficult conceptual idea of Being and Time, on Large’s explicit assessment—is staged through anxiety. What Dasein is in flight from in the everydayness of falling is not this or that thing in the world but its own uniqueness. Fear has an object in the world; anxiety has no determinate object. Anxiety reveals the indefiniteness of its own object as the indefiniteness of Dasein’s Being itself. This indefiniteness is named, with disciplined philosophical care, as nothing. Large registers, more carefully than most introductory texts, that the nothing here is not the ontic nothing of mere non-existence; it is the ontological nothing of a way of Being that is not the Being of any thing. The worldhood of the world is nothing, ontologically, because the ontological origin of any particular ontic world is the Being of Dasein, which is neither present-at-hand nor ready-at-hand. The further consequence Large draws is that the nothing has a positive function: it is what individuates Dasein. The nothing is the space (existentially understood) that Dasein occupies, and the origin of this nothing is Dasein’s own Being. Every Dasein is irreducible to any predicate said of it; the nothing is therefore the metaphysical guarantor of the mineness of Dasein, since it is what prevents Dasein from being absorbed into any cultural or worldly identity. Large keeps a careful distance from the nihilist reading: nihilism, he argues, is itself a way of being occupied by a world, a way of fleeing from the nothing that one is.
The link Large draws between the nothing and Being-towards-death is the pivot of his treatment of the second division. Death, on his reconstruction, is the privileged phenomenon through which the indefiniteness of the nothing receives a determinate phenomenological signature. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein—the formulation Large preserves from BT—and as such it is unlike any other possibility. Other possibilities are possibilities that I might or might not actualise; death is the possibility that strips me of all my other possibilities. Large carefully separates death as actuality, which is true of all life and of the universe itself, from Being-towards-death, which is the existential structure by which Dasein already, while it is alive, has a relation to its own dying. The endnote here introduces what may be the most consequential of Large’s French-Heideggerian markers: that Blanchot and Levinas reverse Heidegger’s formulation, speaking of death as the impossibility of possibility rather than as the possibility of impossibility, and asking whether Heidegger’s analysis avoids the actual distress of dying for the sake of an existential courage that rescues the autonomy of the resolute self. The challenge—that dying may strip Dasein of just the power that resolute anticipation requires—is registered without being adjudicated. The endnote referring the reader to Blanchot’s Space of Literature is, again, an indication of where the philosophical pressure on Being and Time is greatest.
The distinction between anticipation (Vorlaufen, literally running ahead) and expectation (Erwarten) is treated by Large as the key to the existential meaning of authenticity in the face of death. Expectation imagines the realisation of a possibility; anticipation holds the possibility open as a possibility. Authentic Being-towards-death is therefore not a wish for actualisation, since suicide would then be the most authentic decision in the face of death, an absurd conclusion. Anticipation is the running-ahead into a possibility precisely as the impossibility of all other possibilities; it is the comportment that lets Dasein see its life as a whole rather than as a fragmented sequence of partial actualities. The transformation of Dasein’s relation to its life, Large insists, does not need to change the content of that life. The teacher of philosophy remains the teacher of philosophy. What changes is the mode of relation. The everyday flow of unchosen possibilities is replaced by the chosen acceptance of who one already is.
The call of conscience and guilt, which carry the second division forward from death to resoluteness, are handled by Large with the same anti-theological care as falling. The vocabulary—call, conscience, guilt, debt—sounds religious, and Large concedes that it draws on the tradition of Christian self-examination, especially Augustinian self-examination. The early lecture cycle The Phenomenology of Religious Life is cited as the seed-bed of these vocabularies. But the content is ontological. The call of conscience comes from within Dasein; it is Dasein calling to itself out of the gravitational pull of the they-self; the call says nothing in particular, because if it said anything in particular it would be just one more idle voice; what it discloses is the very possibility of being a self. Guilt, Schuld—which in German also carries the sense of debt—is the recognition that I am delivered over to an existence whose origin lies behind me, that I am responsible in being myself for what is not me (the past into which I have been thrown) and for what is not yet (the possibilities into which I have projected myself), and that I am therefore, ontologically, the null basis of a nullity. Large translates Heidegger’s formulation with deliberate fidelity, modifying the standard rendering slightly to capture the German das (nichtige) Grund-sein einer Nichtigkeit. The doubled negativity is the structural form of Dasein’s facticity-and-projection unity: I am the ground of possibilities none of which is necessary, and I am that ground as nothing.
Resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) is presented in close conjunction with disclosure (Erschlossenheit), with Large noting the self-conscious echo of the latter in the former. Resoluteness is the mode in which Dasein, having heard the call of conscience and recognised its guilt, holds itself open to its own disclosing and seizes its possibilities as its own. The result of resoluteness is not a new content of action but a new relation to action; the resolute Dasein produces a situation (Heidegger’s technical term), the difference between the situation and the ordinary flux of habits and rituals being that the situation is constituted by the resolute openness of Dasein rather than by external accident. Large pushes back, almost in passing, against the misreading of resoluteness as a kind of decisional certainty. To be resolute, he writes, is precisely to be absolutely unsure about one’s existence: it is to live in the possible rather than in the actual.
The treatment of temporality, in the final stretch of the commentary, contains Large’s most explicit reversal of Being and Time‘s own order of exposition. He notes that Heidegger’s argument moves from authentic temporality to world-time or practical time and finally to scientific or metaphysical time, and that he, Large, will reverse this order, proceeding from scientific time to world-time to authentic temporality. The justification is phenomenological. Phenomenology must begin with everyday experience; the metaphysical and scientific image of time as a succession of nows is in fact embedded in our everyday experience of time, and so must be loosened first before authentic temporality can be exhibited. Large remarks that this is also the order Heidegger himself adopts in the lectures of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which were delivered in the summer immediately following the publication of Being and Time and which Large recommends as the indispensable commentary on the temporal analyses of the second division. The recommendation does interpretive work: it suggests that Heidegger himself, in the immediate aftermath of Being and Time, recognised that the order of the published text was pedagogically inverted, and that the lecture course rectified this.
The metaphysical image of time as a line of now-points is read by Large as the inherited consequence of Aristotle’s interpretation of time as the counting of change within the horizon of the earlier and later. The subtlety Large extracts is that this interpretation already presupposes a phenomenological horizon—the horizon of earlier and later—that it leaves unthematised. The earlier and the later cannot themselves be derived from the counting of nows, since they are temporal terms that condition the counting. Heidegger’s argument is therefore not that Aristotle’s analysis is false but that it imports an unanalysed phenomenological foundation. The same structure recurs throughout Being and Time: the analysis is not the displacement of an inherited concept but the exhibition of the inherited concept’s unanalysed phenomenological foundation. Large draws an explicit methodological parallel: this is the same form of argument that displaces the primacy of theoretical knowledge by exhibiting the practical involvement that conditions theoretical knowledge.
The introduction of datability (Datierbarkeit) as a moment of world-time is the conceptual bridge to existential temporality. We do not first count numbers and then assign them temporal sense; we first assign things a time because they matter to us—tomorrow I have to go to the office, there is a meeting at 3 p.m. that I cannot miss—and the then of these assignments is what becomes reified as the now-point of the metaphysical image of time. The sun-dial example Large pulls from BT—the sun dates the time which is interpreted in concern—is treated as paradigmatic. The temporality of equipment (the hammer in the activity of hammering) and the temporality of Dasein (the in-order-to that structures the activity) are already implicitly temporal in this datable sense before they are explicitly thematised as temporal. The structure of care is therefore temporally articulated all the way down: ahead-of-itself (the future), already-in-the-world (the past), Being-alongside-beings-encountered-within-the-world (the present).
Authentic temporality, in Large’s reconstruction, is built around the idea that Dasein’s existential time is ecstatic: Dasein stands out from itself in time, projecting itself forward through the understanding into the future, being thrown into the world through the past, and engaging with beings in the present. The three ecstases are not three external dimensions but three constituent modes of a single temporal being. The orientation, however, is decisive: in inauthentic temporality the present is primary, with the past and future organised around the making-present of objects of concern; in authentic temporality the future is primary, with the past and present temporalised through the futural projection toward the possibility of death. The authentic past is repetition (Wiederholung) rather than forgetting: the past as a future possibility I take up rather than as a dead fact I leave behind. The authentic present is the moment of vision (Augenblick), borrowed from Kierkegaard, in which Dasein is thrown back upon itself through anxiety and sees its life as a whole. Large notes the Kierkegaardian provenance of the Augenblick and acknowledges that Being and Time generally borrows little from other writers, the moment of vision being one of the few exceptions.
The treatment of history (Geschichte) extends the temporal analysis into the political and cultural domain and produces what is, on Large’s reading, the most uncomfortable section of Being and Time. The opening move is methodological: the question of what history is must be approached phenomenologically rather than empirically. The museum-object is the test case. What makes the tool in the museum a thing of the past is not any objective property of the tool (broken or worn down) but the fact that the world to which it belonged is no longer the world we inhabit. History is therefore grounded in Dasein’s relation to its own past, and not in the past as an external collection of facts. The repetition that authentic Dasein performs—taking up its past as a future possibility—is what makes history possible in the existential sense. Fate (Schicksal) is the temporal structure of individual repetition; destiny (Geschick) is the temporal structure of communal repetition.
It is in this discussion of destiny that Large permits himself the most direct ethical-political comment in the book. The passages on the fate of a people, he writes, have an uncomfortable tone after the fact. He quotes Heidegger directly: resoluteness implies handing oneself down by anticipation to the ‘there’ of the moment of vision; and this handing down we call ‘fate’. This is also the ground for destiny, by which we understand Dasein’s historizing in Being-with-Others. The implication that the analytic of historicality can be transposed from the individual Dasein to a community of Daseins, that an authentic people can have a destiny by repeating its past, raises a question that Large does not suppress. Who, he writes, can fail to think of Germany’s catastrophe when reading such passages? The question is left as a question: he asks whether the tragedy of Heidegger’s own politics renders his ontology meaningless. He does not answer in the affirmative; ad hominem arguments have no place in philosophy. But he also refuses to leave the matter where Heidegger leaves it. What is lacking in Being and Time, he repeats, is any ethics—any ethics, that is, in which my existence and my right to my existence is called into question by the other, who is not merely a means by which I can be authentic. The question why the death of the other should be less significant than my own, and why it might in fact be more significant, is named as the Levinasian challenge that Heidegger’s text neither poses nor answers.
The chapter on history closes the commentary proper, and at this point Large’s exposition turns to the study aids: a glossary of roughly fifty terms, a curated further-reading list with substantial annotations, and an essay-writing guide. The function of these elements is more than supplementary, and they merit philosophical attention as interpretive operators in their own right. The glossary is, in effect, a second pass through the book in compressed lexical form. Many of its entries restate, in distilled form, theses developed at length in the commentary; some, however, sharpen or revise these theses. The entry on nullity is among the most condensed in the book: it identifies the ontological diagnosis of Dasein’s existence as the discovery that at the basis of its existence there is nothing, that the attributes and occupations through which Dasein interprets itself are inauthentic precisely because anyone else could have them, that the only possibility truly mine is my death (and even this not as a fact but as Being-towards-death), and that the ultimate source of the nullity of Dasein is the ontological difference between Being and beings. Being, the entry concludes, is literally no-thing. The reader is directed to the essay What is Metaphysics? for further explication. The entry compresses, in fewer than three hundred words, the entire argument of the second division of Being and Time and links it to the post-1927 development of Heidegger’s thought.
Several glossary entries operate as discreet philosophical corrections. The entry on transcendence distinguishes two notions: the traditional definition of Being as transcending genus and species, inherited from Aristotle and Scholasticism (and, in Scholastic theology, attached to the definition of God), and the transcendence of Dasein, which replaces this older form. The transcendence of Dasein, Large emphasises, should not be read as a theological structure; Dasein is not God. The transcendence is the temporal-ecstatic structure by which Dasein is always outside itself, projecting forward and recovering its past through that projection. The transcendence of Dasein is the clue, not the substitute, for the meaning of the transcendence of Being. The entry on world is similarly disciplined: the world is not a container, not culture as opposed to nature, but the ontological condition of the distinction between culture and nature; the world is a verb rather than a noun. The entry on being/Being concedes a slight scholarly embarrassment—that explaining the difference in a glossary is faintly absurd, since the difference is the aim of Heidegger’s whole life’s philosophy—and then offers the working distinction nonetheless, noting that some translators and commentators prefer not to capitalise Being, in order to avoid the misleading suggestion that it is some mysterious higher substance, and registering this as a defensible alternative typographic decision.
The annotated further-reading list is in some respects the most revealing part of Large’s apparatus, since it makes explicit the philosophical map that the commentary has been silently presupposing. The list is organised in three parts: Heidegger’s own works, secondary commentaries on Being and Time, and other works cited in the commentary. The Heidegger entries are arranged in a sequence that prioritises The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and History of the Concept of Time as the indispensable supplements to Being and Time itself. On Time and Being, the small essay published in 1962 (Large mistakenly notes 1969 but the actual essay was given as a lecture in 1962), is identified as Heidegger’s own account of why the missing third division of the first part of Being and Time was never written, and as evidence of the so-called Kehre or turn by which Heidegger moved from the priority of Dasein to the priority of Being. The Question Concerning Technology and other essays are identified as the development of seeds already present in Being and Time, particularly the analysis of de-severance. Basic Writings is identified as the route through which the essays What is Metaphysics?, On the Essence of Truth, The Origin of the Work of Art, Letter on Humanism, and The Question Concerning Technology should be approached, with particular emphasis on the Letter on Humanism as the site of Heidegger’s self-critique of Being and Time for its residual subjectivism.
The secondary literature entries are arranged according to a discernible critical hierarchy. Blattner’s Heidegger’s Being and Time is presented as a simplified version of Dreyfus, written in a lively style but limited to the first division and marred by idiosyncratic study questions. Dreyfus’s Being-in-the-World is presented with high respect and considerable reserve: it is described as an excellent commentary that is more reformulation than explanation, that invents a more accessible Heideggerian English at the cost of losing some of the drama and pathos of Heidegger’s writing, and that bears a clear inflection toward pragmatism and analytic philosophy. The Dreyfus entry includes an explicit indication of what Dreyfus omits: there is no commentary on the second division, except for an appendix. Gorner’s recent commentary is presented as a useful but thin summary that sticks close to the German original but lacks analytic finesse. Magda King’s Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time is presented with the warmest endorsement: a detailed, transparent, orderly account of the first division (originally published as Heidegger’s Philosophy) and—uniquely among the recommended works—a commentary on the second division (added posthumously by John Llewelyn). King is praised in part for refusing to adopt Heidegger’s own style, a temptation Large describes as the greatest danger for any commentator on Heidegger.
Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time is identified as a great work of scholarly reconstruction, demonstrating that Being and Time did not descend from the heavens fully formed but emerged from a long gestation in the lectures of the early 1920s. Mulhall’s Routledge Philosophical Guidebook is described as one of the best introductory guides, simpler than Dreyfus and King, with the best explanation of the second division, but heavily inflected by pragmatism and Wittgenstein and entirely ignorant of the French Heideggerians. Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction is presented as clear, philosophically engaged, and lecture-supported. The collection edited by Polt, Heidegger’s Being and Time: Critical Essays, is recommended in part for Grondin’s essay on the question of Being and Barash’s essay on history—both of which Large has cited in his endnotes and both of which mark the French and German receptions respectively. Safranski’s Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil is identified as the best biography, especially for its careful and balanced treatment of Heidegger’s rectorship and Nazi affiliation, with the explicit note that such terrible facts should not prevent us from reading Being and Time.
What this further-reading map silently communicates is the philosophical geography within which Large positions his own book. The Dreyfus-Mulhall-Blattner-Polt axis dominates Anglo introductory writing on Being and Time, and Large names its dominant influences—pragmatism, soft analytic philosophy in the Wittgenstein-Austin-Searle line—as in part explanatory of why this axis tends to focus on the first division and on epistemological questions. The King volume stands somewhat outside this axis, but is sufficiently independent of the French Heideggerians not to be seen as their representative in English. Large’s own book is positioned, by implication and by the consistent endnote references to Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, Critchley, Grondin, and Barash, as the English-language introduction to Being and Time that articulates the French reception’s principal commitments without becoming inaccessible to the first-time student. The Robert Bernasconi endorsement on the cover—naming Large’s book as the first commentary on Being and Time in English to give as much respect to French readings of the book as to analytic readings—confirms the self-positioning that the further-reading map enacts.
The essay-writing guide that closes the volume is, on first reading, the most narrowly pedagogical section of the book. It distinguishes three kinds of question students might encounter—what-questions, how-questions, and why-questions—and recommends that the first two be reformulated as instances of the third in order to render them tractable. It then sets out a four-part structure for the essay: introduction (which must answer the question rather than introduce it), main argument (which provides evidence for the answer), conclusion (which should propose something new rather than summarise), and the use of secondary sources (which should function as expert testimony in the courtroom of philosophical reasoning rather than as summary repetition). The advice is sober and practical and conforms to the pedagogical mission of the Edinburgh Philosophical Guides series.
What is philosophically significant about the essay-writing guide, however, is its alignment with Large’s own methodological commitments. The recommendation to convert all questions into why-questions is, in effect, the recommendation to bring to every encounter with Being and Time the same methodological discipline that Large has been modelling throughout the commentary: never to accept a what-question as a request for definition, but always to reformulate it as a request for the conceptual problem out of which the apparent definition arose. The essay-writing guide thereby becomes the pedagogical externalisation of the book’s own interpretive style. Large’s reading of Being and Time is itself a sustained why-question: why does Heidegger reawaken the question of Being? why does he take phenomenology as the only adequate method? why does Dasein have ontic-ontological priority? why does the third division remain unwritten? why does the missing ethics matter? The advice to students to convert what-questions into why-questions is, on this reading, an invitation to engage with Being and Time in the same manner the commentator has been doing.
The pedagogical advice has one further consequence that is rarely noted in introductions of this kind. The advice insists, in the section on the use of primary sources, that the only evidence the writer has for anything Heidegger has thought is the books Heidegger has written. The writer is then advised that Heidegger is dead and cannot be asked what he meant, but that this does not matter, since the author does not have any better understanding of what she has written than the reader. The aside is brief but it carries philosophical weight. It implies that the meaning of a philosophical text is constituted in the encounter between reader and text rather than retrievable from the author’s intention. The aside aligns Large, almost imperceptibly, with the post-structuralist commitments of the French Heideggerians he has been silently following throughout the commentary. The intentionalist conception of textual meaning is dispatched in three sentences in the pedagogical guide, the implications of which are left for the reader to draw.
If one steps back from the sequence of analyses Large performs and asks what unity the book attains as an integrated philosophical exposition, several patterns of internal tension become salient. The most obvious tension is between the declared modesty of the volume and the substantive philosophical commitments it sustains. The book promises to do no more than help the student through the antique style and difficult vocabulary of Being and Time; it actually performs, alongside this help, a sustained relocation of the centre of gravity of Being and Time‘s reception in English. The French inheritance—Levinas’s challenge to the priority of ontology, Blanchot’s reversal of Being-towards-death, Derrida’s reformulation of destruction as deconstruction, Foucault’s diagnosis of the historical-transcendental tension—is not engaged in detail in the main text, but it is consistently present in the endnotes and structures the order of explanation in ways that are visible to any reader attentive to the form of the book.
A second tension is internal to the philosophical content. Being and Time, on Large’s reconstruction, attempts a project whose two constitutive demands are in mutual pressure. On the one hand, the analytic of Dasein is meant to provide the existential, historical, situated route into the question of Being. On the other hand, the analytic must function as a transcendental analysis whose results carry ontological weight independent of any particular cultural-historical instantiation of Dasein. Large names this tension explicitly, in his rhetorical question about whether Dasein can be both historical and transcendental, and he identifies it as the systemic ground of the incompletion of Being and Time: the third division was never written, he suggests, because Heidegger’s own interpretation of the relation between Dasein and Being remained too enmeshed in the transcendental tradition. The Letter on Humanism, in which Heidegger reverses the priority between Dasein and Being and reads Being and Time as a continuation of the metaphysics of subjectivity in a different form, is repeatedly cited as Heidegger’s own retrospective recognition of this tension.
A third tension concerns the role of ethics in Being and Time. The analytic of Dasein is constructed so as to be ontologically neutral with respect to ethical valuation; the distinctions between authenticity and inauthenticity, between mineness and the they-self, between solicitude and concern, are ontological in form. Large insists, almost obsessively, that these distinctions must not be moralised. And yet the work concludes, in its discussion of history, with the analysis of fate and destiny that aligns the structure of authentic Dasein with the structure of an authentic people, and that became, in Heidegger’s biography, the conceptual scaffold of his Nazi affiliation. Large does not paper over this. He registers the discomfort with which the passages on destiny must be read after the fact, and he repeats the Levinasian charge that what is lacking in Being and Time is any ethics in the proper sense: any analysis in which the existence of the other places my own existence in question. The tension here is one Large leaves visible: the same analytic that promises ontological neutrality contains the seeds of the ethical-political failure that haunted Heidegger’s biography and that has shadowed the reception of his thought ever since.
A fourth tension is methodological. Large’s commentary repeatedly insists that Being and Time must be read as a phenomenological description rather than as an argumentative deduction; that Heidegger’s claims are revealed through appeals to the reader’s experience rather than proved through derivation from principles; that some readers’ exasperation with Heidegger stems from their expectation of logical argument where description is offered. The status of phenomenological evidence is therefore central to the question of how the work’s claims are to be evaluated. Large does not develop a theory of phenomenological evidence; he models its use. The model is that of the broken hammer and the crooked picture: instances drawn from ordinary experience that suddenly disclose the structural features being thematised. The methodological wager is that such instances suffice. Whether they suffice is a question Large leaves open. The reader who finds them sufficient will be persuaded by Being and Time; the reader who does not will find the work mysterious or unconvincing. The methodological wager is itself, by implication, a wager about the priority of phenomenology over alternative modes of philosophical demonstration.
A fifth tension, less explicitly thematised but operative throughout, concerns the relation between the published Being and Time and the lecture corpus from which it emerged and into which it was extended. Large recommends the lecture courses—History of the Concept of Time, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Plato’s Sophist, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics—as the indispensable supplements to the published text. He treats the published text as a fragment that draws its sense from its lecture-context. The implication is that Being and Time is not a self-standing book but a moment in a sustained pedagogical and conceptual labour that began in the early 1920s and continued through the 1930s. The implication is consistent with Kisiel’s reconstruction of the genesis of Being and Time and with the French preference for reading the lecture corpus as primary. It produces, however, a curious effect on Large’s own commentary: the commentary becomes, in a sense, a commentary on the wider Heideggerian project rather than on Being and Time in isolation. The published text is the centre, but the centre’s authority is repeatedly devolved to the periphery. The lecture courses are continually invoked as offering more direct, more vivid, or more developed treatments of the issues thematised in Being and Time.
The form of unity the book attains, given these tensions, may be described—as a working hypothesis suggested by the textual evidence rather than a thesis Large explicitly defends—as one of controlled antinomy. The book holds in disciplined tension a phenomenological starting-point inherited from Husserl, an ontological ambition inherited from Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and the early Greeks, an ethical pressure inherited from Levinas and the French phenomenological tradition, and a methodological signal inherited from Derridean deconstruction and Gadamerian hermeneutics. The tensions among these inheritances are not resolved; they are kept open, modulated by the rhetoric of pedagogical modesty, and rendered visible through the apparatus of endnotes and further-reading recommendations. The unity of the book consists in this articulated relation of tensions rather than in any monistic synthesis of its constituent commitments.
The structural feature that allows this controlled antinomy to function is, on closer inspection, the stratified form of the volume. The main exposition operates as if the various interpretive traditions converged on a single reading; the endnotes operate as the place where the traditions are seen to diverge. The glossary operates as the conceptual core of the book in compressed form; the further-reading list operates as the philosophical geography within which the book is positioned. The essay-writing guide operates as the externalised pedagogical method that doubles the commentary’s own interpretive practice. Each of these strata could, in principle, be read independently. The book invites being used selectively: a student preparing an examination might read only the glossary and the essay-writing guide; a more advanced reader might consult the commentary in conjunction with the lecture courses listed in the further-reading; a specialist might read the endnotes for their signals of philosophical position. The flexibility of use is a function of the formal stratification.
What is therefore most distinctive about the volume, considered as an object of philosophical study, is the way it teaches reading rather than asserting interpretation. Large’s commentary does not provide a definitive reading of Being and Time; it provides a model of how to begin reading Being and Time responsibly. The reading-model has several features that bear repeating. It begins with the method (phenomenology) before the substance (the question of Being). It begins with the lecture corpus (especially History of the Concept of Time) before the published text. It reverses the order of exposition in particular sections (notably truth and temporality) when the order of explanation demands. It insists on the priority of why-questions over what-questions. It registers translation choices as carriers of interpretive commitments. It identifies the tradition behind every apparently novel Heideggerian move (Husserl behind intentionality, Aristotle behind care and behind the question of Being, Kant behind the schema of the categories, Augustine behind falling, Kierkegaard behind the moment of vision). And it consistently locates the philosophical pressure on Being and Time—where the work’s commitments generate strain on its categories—in the endnotes that name Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida, and the broader French phenomenological tradition.
A few moments in the commentary deserve to be revisited in light of this overall pattern, since they exhibit the most concentrated form of Large’s interpretive practice. The first is the treatment of phenomenology in section seven of Being and Time. Large devotes substantial attention to the formula that phenomenology is to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself, and he develops the formula’s reflexive structure with considerable care. The formula, as Large reconstructs it, has the property of being neither purely descriptive nor purely interpretive. It is descriptive in that it does not import a theory from the outside; it is interpretive in that the showing of what shows itself is itself a hidden phenomenon that requires the labour of phenomenological explication to bring into view. The hiddenness of what shows itself is not the hiddenness of a separate entity (in the Kantian sense of a noumenon behind the phenomenon); it is the hiddenness of the showing itself, the manner of presentation that the everyday consciousness does not thematise even as it lives in it. Phenomenology is therefore characterised by a peculiar form of work: it brings into thematic visibility what is already operatively present but not thematically visible. This is the form of work that Large performs throughout his commentary, often with explicit awareness, and the form of work he recommends the student perform in approaching Being and Time.
A second moment that rewards revisitation is the treatment of the relation between the existential and the existentiell. The relation is glossed by Large through the analogy with Kant: the existential is the transcendental condition of the existentiell, in roughly the way that Kant’s transcendental conditions of possible experience are the conditions of empirical experience. The analogy is heuristic, and Large does not press it too far; he is aware that Being and Time is precisely an attempt to displace the transcendental framework as inherited from Kant. The analogy nonetheless illuminates a structural feature of Heidegger’s procedure. The existential analytic does not describe particular existentiells; it exhibits the structural features that any existentiell must instantiate by virtue of being an instance of Dasein. The roots of the existential analytic are, however, ultimately existentiell: there must be actual Daseins, actual choices, actual habits, in order for the structural features to be available for description. The relation between the existential and the existentiell is therefore not the relation between an abstract structure and its instantiations; it is the relation between a structural description and the experiential evidence on which the description rests. This is one of the most subtle methodological features of Being and Time, and Large’s gloss—the existential is what every existentiell must presuppose, but the existential can be exhibited only through reflection on the existentiell—captures it without distortion.
A third moment is the treatment of equipment and signs in chapter three of the first division. Large develops the analysis of equipment beyond its standard expository function by drawing attention to the role of signs (Zeichen) as the moment within the analysis where the equipmental structure becomes thematic. The car indicator (in Heidegger’s time, the small red arrow) is the paradigm: an instance of equipment whose function is precisely to indicate. The example matters because it shows that within the equipmental totality there are pieces of equipment whose role is to make the totality itself thematic. The driver’s act of signalling presupposes the entire infrastructure of roads, intersections, journeys, and human projects; the signal is the moment at which this infrastructure becomes available to others as the context of the driver’s act. The analysis of signs is therefore not an isolated example but a self-reflective moment within the equipmental analysis: equipment that signals, equipment that makes equipmentality visible. Large does not press this self-reflective dimension explicitly, but his attention to the structure of the example—the indication is not primary; serviceability is primary; serviceability has its source in Dasein—suggests that he is aware of the methodological significance.
A fourth moment is the role of fear in the discussion of moods. Large devotes considerable attention to the distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear has an ontic object: I fear this thing or that person, the lion or the flood. Anxiety has no ontic object: I am anxious about my world as a whole, about my own existence as such. The phenomenological discrimination between fear and anxiety is one of the most precise pieces of analytical work in Being and Time, and Large preserves its precision. The discrimination is, however, also the conduit through which the most important methodological commitments of the second division are introduced. Anxiety reveals the worldhood of the world as nothing; the disclosure of the nothing through anxiety is the precondition for the analysis of Being-towards-death; the analysis of Being-towards-death is the precondition for the analysis of conscience, guilt, and resoluteness; the analysis of resoluteness is the precondition for the analysis of authentic temporality. The chain of dependencies is tight, and Large preserves it. The chain also has an interesting structural feature: each link in the chain transforms the conceptual content of the previous link, so that what begins as the description of a peculiar mood (anxiety) ends as the description of the ontological structure of time itself. The transformation is gradual; no single step is implausible; the cumulative effect is the displacement of the entire metaphysical inheritance of the conception of time.
A fifth moment that rewards attention is the role of repetition in the analysis of authentic temporality and history. Repetition (Wiederholung) is one of Heidegger’s most original conceptual coinages, and its function within Being and Time is structurally crucial. The authentic past is repetition rather than forgetting; the inauthentic past is forgetting rather than repetition. The temporal direction of repetition is paradoxical: the past is taken up as a future possibility, so that what was behind becomes what is ahead. Large preserves the paradoxical formulation and makes it intelligible by anchoring it in the analysis of authentic history. The museum-object becomes significant for me only because I take up its world as a possibility for my own self-understanding; I go into the museum, when I do so authentically, to understand myself. The past world that the object discloses becomes a future possibility because I project it forward as a self-understanding I might inhabit. The reverse direction is also possible: the object becomes a piece of inauthentic curiosity, devoured for the spectacle of distance, with no real involvement in the past it discloses. The distinction between authentic and inauthentic history is therefore not a matter of accuracy or scholarship but of the temporal direction of one’s relation to the past. Authentic history is the future-oriented retrieval of the past; inauthentic history is the present-oriented consumption of the past. Large notes, in passing, that this analysis is the basis of Heidegger’s later analysis of technology, in which the past is reduced to a resource available for present manipulation rather than to a possibility for future self-understanding.
A sixth moment is the treatment of the missing third division, Time and Being. The status of this missing text is, on Large’s repeated insistence, the structural feature that makes Being and Time what it is: a fragment whose incompletion is integral to its meaning. The third division was meant to draw out the meaning of Being in general from the analysis of Dasein and the analysis of time. The fact that this draw-out was never accomplished is, on Large’s reading, not an accident of biography or publishing schedules; it reflects a deeper methodological difficulty. The transcendental aspiration of the analytic of Dasein—the aspiration to derive the meaning of Being from the structure of the being for whom Being is an issue—was, on Heidegger’s own later judgement, an aspiration that remained complicit with the metaphysics of subjectivity it was attempting to displace. The third division was unwritable because what was needed was a different methodological starting-point, one that the Being and Time framework could not provide. The post-1927 development of Heidegger’s thought—the so-called turn—is, on this reading, the gradual emergence of an alternative methodological starting-point in which Being takes priority over Dasein and the metaphysics of subjectivity is more thoroughly displaced. The 1962 essay Time and Being tells, in Heidegger’s own retrospective voice, why the original division was impossible. Large refers the reader to this essay and signals that its reading repays the patience of the student.
A seventh moment, perhaps the most ethically charged, is the treatment of Heidegger’s Nazism in the introduction and in the discussion of historicality. The treatment is, in form, restrained: Large devotes only a few sentences to the matter in each location. The substantive position, however, is firm. The biographical question of whether the Nazi affiliation should prevent us from reading and teaching Heidegger is answered negatively; we should read and teach. The philosophical question of whether the Nazi affiliation infects Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole is answered, on Large’s view, more affirmatively: what is lacking in Being and Time, and perhaps in all of Heidegger’s work, is a serious engagement with ethics. The Levinasian reading is the one Large endorses, in the modulated form of an indication rather than a thesis. The reading is consequential because it shapes the interpretive priorities of the commentary as a whole. The most pointed ethical moments—the question of the other in solicitude, the question of Being-towards-death and the death of the other, the question of the structural analogy between authentic Dasein and an authentic people—are precisely the moments at which Large permits the Levinasian challenge to surface in the endnotes. The strategy is one of cumulative pressure: no single endnote constitutes a frontal attack on Heidegger’s project, but the sum of the endnotes constitutes a sustained reservation about the project’s ethical adequacy.
The result is a commentary that practises a curious form of philosophical honesty. It teaches Being and Time with the discipline of a sympathetic reader who has internalised the work’s methodological commitments; it simultaneously registers, through the stratified apparatus of endnotes and further-reading, the philosophical reservations that a more advanced reader of the same tradition would bring. The student is not encouraged to share the reservations; the student is encouraged to know that the reservations exist. The pedagogical effect is to produce a reader who, having understood Being and Time on its own terms, is in a position to encounter the reservations as an internal continuation of the work rather than as an external dismissal of it. This is, in my reading, an inference about the book’s pedagogical intent that the textual evidence supports without explicitly stating: the form of the book is calibrated to produce readers who can move from the commentary to the French reception (and to the related German receptions through Gadamer and Arendt) without experiencing the move as a rupture.
A small but suggestive piece of evidence for this inference is the treatment of Hannah Arendt in the endnotes to the chapter on others. The discussion of the they-self and the public world in Being and Time is, on Large’s reading, largely negative; the inauthentic mode of being-with-others dominates the analysis. Large notes, in an endnote, that the public world might have a more positive interpretation, and refers the reader to Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition. The reference is brief but indicative. Arendt was Heidegger’s most famous student, and her treatment of the public world as the space of plural action—not as the levelling-down of possibilities but as the condition for the appearance of distinctive deeds and words—is one of the most important post-Heideggerian reformulations of the political dimension of human existence. Large does not develop the Arendtian reading; he marks its availability. The marking aligns with the book’s general practice of indicating, in the endnotes, the directions in which a more advanced reading might continue.
A similar structural function is performed by the references to Foucault in the endnote on the historical-transcendental tension. The closing pages of Foucault’s Order of Things, in which the doubling of man as both empirical object and transcendental subject is identified as the constitutive instability of the modern human sciences, are presented as the philosophical horizon within which Large’s question about Dasein’s historical-transcendental status would be developed. Foucault is not engaged in the commentary itself; he is named once, in an endnote, with a precise indication of the relevant text. The same pattern recurs with Derrida (named for the Letter to a Japanese Friend and for the concept of deconstruction), Critchley (named for The Ethics of Deconstruction), Grondin (named for the essay in the Polt collection), Barash (named for the essay on historical meaning), Levinas (named for Is Ontology Fundamental? and God, Death and Time), and Blanchot (named for The Space of Literature). In each case, the name is attached to a precise text, and the precise text is the philosophical resource that would extend the reading beyond the commentary’s main exposition.
The cumulative effect of these endnotes is to constitute a kind of shadow bibliography of the French reception of Heidegger, accessible to the student who chooses to follow the references and invisible to the student who does not. The shadow bibliography is, in itself, a philosophical statement about the relation between Being and Time and its later receptions. The statement is that the most important conceptual transformations of Heidegger’s project occurred in France in the decades following the publication of Being and Time: Levinas’s ethical inversion of ontology, Blanchot’s literary phenomenology of death, Derrida’s reformulation of destruction as deconstruction, Foucault’s diagnosis of the historical-transcendental doublet. The student who follows the endnotes is led into a reading-list whose centre of gravity is precisely this transformation. The student who reads only the main text is led into a clear, accessible exposition of Being and Time that does not yet thematise the transformation but prepares the conceptual ground for it.
Considered as an integrated piece of pedagogical-philosophical work, Large’s commentary therefore performs a delicate operation: it teaches Being and Time as if the work were self-sufficient, while simultaneously preparing the reader to recognise that the work is not self-sufficient, that its conceptual commitments generate strains that the work itself does not resolve, and that the most important post-Heideggerian philosophical traditions have been concerned precisely with these unresolved strains. The operation is not unique to Large; it is the operation of any serious commentary on a philosophical classic. What is distinctive about Large’s execution is the formal stratification that allows the operation to be performed within the constraints of an introductory series. The constraints are honoured; the substantive content is preserved. The reader who needs only an introduction receives an introduction. The reader who needs more is given the resources to find it.
If one asks, finally, what philosophical unity the commentary as a whole attains, the answer must be qualified. The commentary is, by design, not a treatise; it does not advance a single thesis about Being and Time. Its unity is rather the unity of a philosophical reading-practice: a disciplined way of moving through Being and Time that respects the work’s internal articulations, exhibits its methodological commitments, registers its conceptual tensions, and positions it within the broader philosophical tradition to which it belongs. The reading-practice is consistent throughout, and this consistency is what gives the commentary its philosophical weight. Each section of the commentary applies the same set of methodological discriminations: between the ontic and the ontological, between the categorial and the existential, between the present-at-hand and the ready-at-hand, between authenticity and inauthenticity (held to ontological neutrality), between the existential and the existentiell, between description and argument, between fact and possibility, between expectation and anticipation, between forgetting and repetition. The recurrence of these discriminations across all the analyses gives the commentary the structural coherence of a sustained practice rather than a discrete set of arguments.
The recurrence also produces, by accumulation, a portrait of Being and Time as a work whose internal coherence consists in the rigorous application of a small number of fundamental distinctions to a wide range of phenomena. The distinctions are deployed in the analysis of the question of Being itself, in the analysis of equipment, in the analysis of others, in the analysis of moods, in the analysis of language, in the analysis of truth, in the analysis of anxiety, in the analysis of death, in the analysis of conscience and guilt, in the analysis of resoluteness, in the analysis of time, and in the analysis of history. The distinctions are not modified across these analyses; they are clarified, deepened, and integrated. What begins as the discrimination between the ontic and the ontological in the introduction to Being and Time ends as the discrimination between the ontic time of clocks and the ontological temporality of Dasein in the second division. What begins as the discrimination between the present-at-hand and the ready-at-hand in the analysis of equipment ends as the discrimination between the metaphysical conception of time as the line of nows and the existential conception of time as ecstatic temporality. The continuity is the proof that Being and Time is, in its conceptual structure, a unified work; the incompletion at the level of execution is the proof that the unity does not extend to the entire project Heidegger envisioned. Large’s commentary captures both the unity and the incompletion.
The conclusion the reader of Large’s commentary is led to draw, by the cumulative weight of the exposition, is that Being and Time attains a form of unity Large does not name but that the textual evidence suggests: the unity of a fragment that is whole at the level of method but incomplete at the level of execution. The methodological apparatus—the phenomenological reduction, the analytic of Dasein, the destruction of the history of ontology, the ecstatic conception of temporality—is fully articulated within the published text. What is missing is the application of this apparatus to the question of Being in general; the third division was to perform this application, and it was never written. The unity of the work is therefore the unity of a method whose application remains in part promissory. The unity is not, on this reading, a defect of the work; it is the form the work has been given by its author. Heidegger, in the Letter on Humanism and in the 1962 essay Time and Being, reflected explicitly on the impossibility of completing the work within the framework it had set itself. The reflection is, on Large’s reading, the proper continuation of Being and Time: the work continues, in Heidegger’s own later development and in the receptions that have built on it, precisely by recognising the limit of its initial framework and moving beyond it.
The final paragraph of Large’s commentary on history closes with a question rather than an assertion: is ontology the one and only important question, as Levinas suggested? The question is left open. The commentary does not adjudicate it. The reader is invited to take up the question in the conclusion of her essay or in the next stage of her philosophical reading. The openness is, in my reading, the most honest expression of the commentary’s overall stance. Being and Time poses a question—the question of Being—and reawakens it for a tradition that had forgotten it. Whether ontology, so reawakened, is the proper centre of philosophy is itself a question, and it is not a question Being and Time can settle. The Levinasian challenge to the priority of ontology, the Derridean diagnosis of the persistence of metaphysics within the very destruction of metaphysics, the Foucauldian critique of the historical-transcendental doublet, and the Gadamerian extension of hermeneutic ontology into the theory of interpretation are all available continuations of the question. Large’s commentary positions the student in such a way that these continuations are available to her without being prescribed.
The shape of the commentary, overall, is therefore the shape of an invitation rather than the shape of a verdict. The invitation is to read Being and Time slowly, in the company of the lecture courses that surround it, with attention to its methodological commitments, with awareness of its incompletion, and with knowledge of the receptions that have continued its labour. The invitation is, in form, that of an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide; in substance, it is that of a teacher who has spent many years with the work and with the reception and who wants the student to begin where she herself once began: with the strangeness of the question, with the disorientation of the introduction, with the patient work of phenomenological description, and with the readiness to encounter the tensions that the work generates rather than to seek their premature resolution. The fact that the invitation can be issued within the constraints of an introductory series, without sacrificing the philosophical seriousness of the project, is what makes the volume worth attending to as an object of study in its own right.
What remains, by way of summary observation rather than thesis, is the recognition that Large’s commentary stands in a particular relation to the broader landscape of Anglo-language introductions to Being and Time. Most of those introductions, as Large himself notes in the further-reading list, are influenced by Dreyfus and by the soft-analytic tradition of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Searle. The Dreyfusian style emphasises the analysis of equipment, the analysis of social practices, and the displacement of epistemology by ontology in the first division of Being and Time. The style has produced excellent work and has succeeded in making Heidegger accessible to readers trained in analytic philosophy. The style has, however, certain blind spots. It tends to leave the second division underdeveloped; it tends to neglect the analyses of anxiety, death, conscience, and time; it tends to omit the analyses of history and historicality; and it tends to suppress the connections between Being and Time and the later Heidegger, especially the analyses of technology and the analyses of language and poetry that occupied Heidegger’s post-war thought. Large’s commentary, by deliberate design, addresses precisely these blind spots. It treats the second division with the same care as the first; it develops the analyses of anxiety, death, conscience, and time at length; it includes a substantial discussion of history and historicality; and it indicates, throughout, the continuities between Being and Time and the later Heidegger. The result is an introduction that is more comprehensive in its coverage of Being and Time than the Dreyfusian alternatives, and that is more attentive to the French reception of Heidegger than the analytic alternatives.
The cost of this comprehensiveness is a certain compression. Large covers a great deal of ground in a relatively short book, and the coverage is necessarily compressed at certain points. The analysis of truth, for example, is condensed into a few pages, even though it is one of the most consequential analyses in Being and Time and one to which Heidegger returned repeatedly in his later work. The analysis of history, similarly, is compressed; the analysis of language is brief; the analysis of resoluteness, which is the conceptual hinge of the second division, is shorter than its centrality would warrant. The compressions are evidently the result of the constraints of an introductory series; they are not failures of judgment on Large’s part. The reader who needs a more extensive treatment of any of these themes is directed, through the further-reading list, to the relevant lecture courses or to the more developed secondary literature. The commentary functions, in this respect, as a kind of philosophical map: the topography is laid out, the routes between the territories are indicated, and the reader is invited to traverse the routes at her own pace.
The pace of the commentary itself is, by the standards of introductory writing, brisk. The argument moves forward without lingering. The expository style is direct and concrete, often resorting to homely examples—the television, the remote control, the spectacles on the end of the nose, the hammer, the broken hammer, the crooked picture on the wall—that are drawn from the same well of everyday experience as Heidegger’s own examples. The style is consistent with the methodological commitment to phenomenology as the description of everyday experience: the commentary practises phenomenology in its very form of writing. The reader is asked, repeatedly, to verify the analyses against her own experience: to notice the disappearance of equipment in use, to attend to the way moods reveal the world as a whole, to recognise the difference between fearing this or that and being anxious about one’s life as such. The exhortation to experiential verification is one of the most consistent features of the commentary, and it aligns the commentary with the phenomenological method it is teaching.
A reader interested in the relation between the commentary’s form and its content might note that the commentary’s writing itself models the phenomenological discipline. The discipline involves the suspension of inherited theoretical commitments and the patient description of what shows itself in everyday experience. The commentary suspends, for the duration of its exposition, the contested philosophical positions named in its endnotes (Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, Critchley, Grondin, Barash) and patiently describes what shows itself in Being and Time on the work’s own terms. The contested positions are not absent; they are bracketed, available for retrieval in the apparatus, but suspended from the immediate exposition. The discipline of the exposition is the discipline of the method it teaches. The commentary is, in this sense, a piece of applied phenomenology: it brings Being and Time into thematic visibility by suspending the contested receptions and describing the work as it shows itself.
The reader who completes the commentary is left with a particular kind of philosophical formation. She has been introduced to Being and Time; she has been taught to read it phenomenologically rather than analytically; she has been alerted to the central tensions of the work without being asked to resolve them; she has been given a map of the lecture corpus that surrounds the published text; she has been given a map of the secondary literature, with its analytic and French branches distinguished; she has been given the resources to extend her reading into the receptions of Heidegger that have continued the work’s labour; and she has been taught a method of essay-writing that externalises the interpretive practice the commentary has been modelling. The formation is unusually thorough for an introductory text. It positions the student not merely to pass an examination but to enter the conversation around Being and Time as a participant rather than an eavesdropper—which, as the series editor’s preface declared at the outset, is the formal ambition of the Edinburgh Philosophical Guides.
The relation between the formal ambition of the series and the substantive achievement of Large’s volume is, on the textual evidence, a relation of fulfilment with inflection. The series ambition is the production of readers who can join the great dialogue of philosophy; Large’s volume produces such readers, with a particular inflection toward the French reception of Heidegger and with a particular sensitivity to the conceptual tensions that have made Being and Time a perennial site of philosophical contestation. The inflection is the contribution Large makes to the series. It is what gives his volume its distinctive character among the volumes of the Edinburgh Philosophical Guides, and what justifies, in the language of the Bernasconi endorsement on the cover, the description of his book as the first commentary on Being and Time in English to give as much respect to French readings of the book as to analytic readings.
The commentary closes, then, not with a verdict but with an invitation: the invitation to read Being and Time and to continue the reading beyond the commentary itself. The invitation is the proper form of conclusion for a work whose central thesis—that Being and Time is a fragment whose meaning extends beyond its published execution—forbids the closure of a final judgment. The fragmentary character of Being and Time, which Large has registered throughout, is matched by the open-ended character of the commentary that surrounds it. The reader who has been with Large from the introduction to the essay-writing guide has been taught a particular philosophical patience: the patience to encounter a work that does not complete itself, to recognise the tensions that prevent its completion, and to continue the work in the form of further reading rather than to seek its premature closure. The patience is the philosophical virtue the commentary cultivates. It is, in my reading, the form in which the controlled antinomy of the volume’s commitments is most clearly visible: not as a doctrine that the commentary asserts, but as a discipline that the commentary practises and that the reader is invited to make her own.
If a final characterisation is to be offered of the kind of unity the work attains, it is the unity of a sustained philosophical patience: a patience that respects the strangeness of the question of Being, that suspends the inherited theoretical commitments that obscure that strangeness, that registers the conceptual tensions that the question generates within the framework that poses it, and that opens onto the receptions of Heidegger that have continued the labour of the question without claiming to have completed it. The unity is methodological rather than doctrinal, formal rather than substantive, pedagogical rather than thetic. It is the unity appropriate to a commentary on a fragment whose fragmentary character is integral to its philosophical meaning. The commentary, by sharing this character, becomes a fitting introduction to the work it expounds.
Simon Gros 
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