What to do with Greek philosophy, from Hermann Mörchen's transcript of the last lecture of the summer semester 1926 course at Marburg.

Greek ontology is an ontology of the world. Being is interpreted as presence and constancy. Being is conceptualized on the basis of the present, naively on the basis of the phenomenon of time, in which, however, the present is only one mode. Question: how is it that the present has this privilege? Do not the past and future have the same rights? Must Being not be apprehended on the basis of the whole of temporality? Fundamental problems taken up in the question of Being. We will understand the Greeks only when we have appropriated this question; i.e., when we have confronted the Greeks by vigourously countering their quetioning with our own.

Pp. 230-231

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