Heidegger's Notion of Care

Heidegger is said to have had a turn (Kehre) from the combined existential and ontological concerns in his 1927 masterwork Being and Time to focus on the fundamental problem of ontology - the meaning of "Being." He first studied Aristotle's views on ontology and then looked backward in time to the earlier work in Plato's fictitious Parmenides, then to the few fragments of Parmenides' great Poe on Nature.

Heidegger's to the earliest presocratic philosophers was to recover what he called the "question of Being," which he claimed had been forgotten in the sophisticated development of metaphysics by the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He lectured on Parmenides as early as 1922 and in 1932 started his arguments with Anaximander of Miletus, in a work published in German in 2012 and recently translated into English as The Beginning of Western Philosophy.

Heidegger began lecturing on early Greek thinkers perhaps as early as 1915, and repeated work on their works for the rest of his life. The questions he raised are those first treated by Friedrich Nietzsche in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which appeared only posthumously in 1903. Nietzsche singled out Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras.