Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Volume 60, Issue 2, March 2000

Steven Galt Crowell
Pages 307-331

Metaphysics, Metontology, and the End of Being and Time

In 1928 Heidegger argued that the transcendental philosophy he had pursued in Being and Time needed to be completed by what he called “metontology.” This paper analyzes what this notion amounts to. Far from being merely a curiosity of Heidegger scholarship, the place occupied by “metontology” opens onto a general issue concerning the relation between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics, and also between both of these and naturalistic empiricism. I pursue these issues in terms of an ambiguity in the notion of “grounding” in Being and Time and in the works of what I call Heidegger’s “metaphysical decade” (1927 - 1937), defending a phenomenological conception (giving priority to the theory of meaning) against what proves to be the illusory idea that metaphysical grounds are presupposed in such transcendental philosophy.