The aim of this crisply written study is to elaborate and criticize the basic direction of the third section of the first part of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, the unfinished but, as it were, systematic center of the entire project. Kohler undertakes this ambitious project with the help of lectures held right after the completion of Sein und Zeit as well as the lectures of the winter semester of 1925/26 (entitled "Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit"). In these lectures the works of Scheler and Kant figure significantly and Kohler, accordingly, devotes the first four chapters of the book to the way in which the use of schemata by these two thinkers is reworked by Heidegger in an attempt to schematize the sense of `to be'. The first and second chapters of the book lucidly detail affinities and disaffinities between Scheler's analysis of the environment and Heidegger's analysis of Dasein. Scheler's more dynamic, but also more restricted, use of the concept of schema is indicated as are several crucial differences between the two thinkers (points of departure, views on the finitude of human cognition, concepts of transcendence and of being, and views on time, the relation of time and being, and Kant).

In chapters 3 and 4 Kohler turns to Heidegger's interpretation of, respectively, Kant's schematism-doctrine and its role in Heidegger's reading of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft as a whole. The "violence" of Heidegger's interpretation does not deter Kohler from pursuing the objective of unpacking how Heidegger's reading of the schematismdoctrine was instrumental in the latter's attempt to provide a temporal differentiation of the senses of `to be'. These chapters are well-informed and judiciously written for the most part (though "Modalitat und Realitat" on page 56 should probably read "Modalitat und Relation" since the reference is the two sets of dynamic categories in Kant). Still, the account is somewhat sparse; even for the purpose at hand, more consideration of the extent to which Heidegger's interpretation purportedly resolves problems, real or apparent, in Kant's text would have been helpful. More attention might also have been paid to the role played by the neo-Kantian interpretation in Heidegger's reading and project of schematization, not only in general but also in details.

The crux of the book takes center stage in its fifth and final chapter. Directly at odds with interpretations by Gillepsie, Figal, and others, Kohler contends that Heidegger succeeds in at least indicating the direction of the transition from fundamental ontology to ontology proper, that is to say, from an interpretation of what `to be' means in the case of Dasein to an interpretation what `to be' means as such. The key to this transition is the difference between Zeitlichkeit and Temporalitat, where the former constitutes what it means "da zu sein" and the latter the generic meaning of `to be'. On Kohler's reading, however, Zeitlichkeit is the "more universal" concept inasmuch as it functions as the "condition of the possibility of the pre-ontological as well as the ontological understanding of being" (p. 109). In other words, Temporalitat is Zeitlichkeit insofar as the latter is regarded in its function of making the understanding of being possible. Kohler shows how, in close analogy with the structure of Kant's schemata (as Heidegger interprets them), the schemata of ecstatic-horizontal temporality (in [sections]69 of Sein und Zeit as well as the Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie) function as both the horizon ("Ekstema") and the process of regulating the projection, a dual function that makes understanding of `to be' possible. Kohler suggests that this function may be understood, too, as that of a "formal indication," Heidegger's expression for philosophical concepts.

Kohler concludes his "attempt at a reconstruction" of Heidegger's schematization of the sense of `to be' by noting its limitations as well as a fundamental problem underlying it (both more or less acknowledged by Heidegger himself). The schematization does not illuminate the manner of being appropriate to animals, nature, cultural phenomena, artworks, and language; nor, on the basis of the schematization, is it clear whether anything like a fundamental concept of being is in the offing or, if it is, how it might relate to the multiple senses of `to be' or to time. Yet, even if these limitations could be overcome, Kohler argues, the analysis in Sein und Zeit supposes a distinction that it cannot sustain, namely, between a community's ontic, everyday existence and the historicity of individual Dasein's authentic existence. The trenchancy of these difficulties may be doubted (does not the "formal-anzeigende" character render some of them moot?), yet Kohler has done an admirable job of presenting them economically and forcefully.