Is the analysis of being provided by Heidegger sufficient to serve as a ground for approaching the question of the sense of being? Essentially, Edith Stein's answer is negative. Echoing the sentiments of the philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Edith Stein believes that Heidegger's project attempts to open the doors to and reinvestigate the question of being. She concedes that Heidegger may have well been on his way to re-opening the question of being and giving it a cosmological significance, however, he fails in his Entwurf (project) because he ultimately confines the question of being to Dasein. Being, understood in a multiplicity of forms ranging from the simple onta to higher more complex beings, is never fully interrogated. Heidegger excludes them from speaking forth. Furthermore, no room is given to the possible questioning of the First Being, God. Heidegger questions, but does he always listen to the response? Moreover, because Heidegger may not hear a response when he questions certain types of beings, this does not necessarily imply that these beings are incapable of responding. Perhaps Heidegger is incapable of understanding their response because they respond in ways different from Dasein, for they do not speak like Dasein. Their being may have meaning in the fact that their appearance (Erscheinungen) speak forth-an articulation without articulation.

Stein concludes her work by asking whether it would not have been wiser on the part of Heidegger to be more closely in dialogue with the tradition of metaphysics. She wonders if a treatment of the analogia entis would have proven more fruitful. She also believes that a more thorough examination of thinkers like Thomas, Aristotle and other Greek thinkers may have proven challenging. Heidegger's dismissal of the tradition of Western metaphysics as analyzing being only in terms of Vorhandensein has not done justice to the subtleties and depth of the tradition. Ultimately, Heidegger has given a sense to the question of being which is much too auto-referential. Dasein becomes the ultimate and absolute framework wherein being comes to play itself out. It is interesting to note that Stein wishes to compare future works of Heidegger to his earlier works. She undoubtedly recognized that Sein und Zeit was not completed as it was supposed to have been. Unfortunately, Stein perished before she ever had the chance to become familiar with the later Heidegger's work.

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