Heidegger isn't just the great thinker of modernity - of motorways, power stations and skyscrapers as Being's staffs and anchors - he's also the great thinker of Being itself. For my money, he's the most important philosopher ever. He's like a switchboard into which the Greeks all run, and through which their thought is transferred onwards to the likes of Levinas, Derrida and Virilio. Where Plato expelled the poets from his Republic, Heidegger installs them at the heart of his, unravelling the lines of, for example, Hölderlin and Trakl to show that techné and poesis are the very things that place us in the world and unfold us in time.

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