Book excerpt: Ontology - The Hermeneutics of Facticity, first published in 1988 as volume 63 of Martin Heidegger's Collected Works, is the first English translation of a lecture course given during his legendary early Freiburg period (1915-1923). Anticipating both the phenomenological hermeneutical analysis of factical Dasein in Being and Time (1927) and the poetic thinking in Heidegger's writings after 1930, the experimental theme of these renowned lecture course notes from the summer semester of 1923 is the "be-ing there" of facticity in "the awhileness of its temporal particularity." The 33-year-old Heidegger illustrates this theme with an ingenious interpretation of the table in his home and the activities of his young family around it.