system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How successful was Heidegger In redefining Ontology in his quests to understand Being?

This question was derived from reading ‘A guide to Heideggers Being & Time (Magda King)

This is my dissertation question. Any thoughts and references would be greatly appreciated.
gpt
I don’t think his goal was to “redefine” Ontology so much as to “recover” Ontology as a separate (and more foundational) field of study, distinct from Metaphysics. He explicitly argues in Part 1 of Being and Time that the merger of Ontology and Metaphysics, with Metaphysics overtaking Ontology and Ontology “forgotten”, was completed with Scholasticism and runs through all modern philosophy. Relatedly, he thinks there’s something about the Latin language contra Greek that helped facilitate this development. All this explains his interest in Plato, Aristotle, and the Pre-Socratics, trying to read them in a way that brackets the interpretations of Scholastic and Modern philosophers, to recover/demonstrate the primacy of Ontology. 

I don’t really know to judge success in this case. On the one hand, if you come across the word Ontology, you’ll soon come across Heidegger’s name. But he didn’t really have a research project that survived him, though Dreyfus and Gadamer did expound on his work outside of Germany and applied it with some success to fields like AI. Obviously Derrida was also influenced by Heidegger and his project was in some sense ontological, but I’m not sure Heidegger would necessarily agree that Derrida understood him correctly.