No commentary can hope to substitute for the reading of the text itself, but it can provide a helping hand. Being and Time is probably one of the most important books written in the twentieth century. It has influenced not only philosophers, but a wide range of people from writers and poets to psychiatrists and scientists. Like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it announces a fundamental shift in the way we understand ourselves and the world, and we are perhaps still wrestling today with all its ramifications and consequences. This book is meant only to provide assistance for the student and the general reader and does not engage in any detailed way with the scholarship surrounding this work (which the reader might imagine is quite vast).
Unlike the other commentaries on Being and Time, however, it does come from a different background. Nearly all the introductory books in English on this work are heavily influenced by Dreyfus’ great work Being-in-the-World. There are probably two reasons for this: firstly, one of the great strengths of this book is that it tries to explain Heidegger rather than just imitate him; and secondly, it springs from the analytic tradition (at least the ‘soft’ kind of Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle) which is dominant both in the US and the UK. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does tend to ignore the manner in which the book was first received, in France, and has quite a different way of reading Heidegger which does not so much focus on epistemological questions (even if they are always overturned in relation to ontology) and the first division of Being and Time. This present book comes from a serious engagement with the French Heideggerians for many years.
Simon Gros 
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