Being and Time previous philosophies that had become entrenched and hidden within the theoretical attitude of the metaphysics of presence. This use of the word "Destruktion" is meant to signify not a negative operation but rather a positive transformation or recovery. In "Being and Time" Heidegger briefly undertakes a destructuring of the philosophy of René Descartes, but the second volume, which was intended to be a "Destruktion" of Western philosophy in all its stages, was never written. In later works Heidegger uses this approach to interpret the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Plato, among others. "Being and Time" is the major achievement
Being work of such influential theorists as W. V. O. Quine, to name one of many. One of the most fundamental questions that continues to exercise philosophers is posed by William James: "How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? ... from nothing to being there is no logical bridge." The deficit of such a bridge was first encountered in history by the Pre-Socratic philosophers during the process of evolving a classification of all beings (noun). Aristotle, who wrote after the Pre-Socratics, applies the term category (perhaps not originally)