Being and Time describes his project in the following way: "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of "being" and to do so concretely." Heidegger claims that traditional ontology has prejudicially overlooked this question, dismissing it on the basis that being is the most universal and emptiest concept, that is indefinable or obvious. Instead Heidegger proposes to understand being itself, as distinguished from any specific entities (beings). "'Being' is not something like a being." Being, Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." Heidegger is seeking
German American journalism Louis (1864-1905). Franz Grimm, exiled editor of the 'Blätter der Zeit' in Brunswick, Germany, resettled across from St. Louis in Belleville, Illinois, where his "Belleviller Zeitung" became an influential voice for the German-Americans of southern Illinois. Grimm was influential in supporting Abraham Lincoln for the 1860 nomination and in explaining the issues of the war to his readers. Forty-Eighter Hermann Raster wrote passionately against slavery and for Lincoln. Raster published anti-slavery pamphlets and was the editor of the most influential German language newspaper in America at the time. He helped secure the votes of German-Americans across the United States for