As you begin reading this entry, in all likelihood you are in a familiar place (your room, the library) surrounded by familiar things (this volume, a desk, a pen, a cup of coffee or tea, and so on). Briefly survey the scene before you. Let me ask you now to close your eyes while contemplating the bare fact, worthy of some kind of wonder, that things are there at all. Then open your eyes and reacquaint yourself with those familiar things within the frame of this wonder. If you are struck by the remarkable fact of things being there at all, you might find yourself entertaining the following question: what exactly is it for things to be? This is one formulation of what Heidegger calls ‘the question of being’ (the Seinsfrage).