This book has taken rather longer to write than I ever anticipated. Indeed, it is a book for which a partial version already existed at the beginning of 1999. Administrative and other duties prevented me from pursuing the project, however, and the final version actually represents a major reworking and rewriting of the original material—indeed, there is very little of the original that remains. Although a considerable amount of work had thus already been undertaken beforehand, the core elements in the book were actually developed in a series of articles published between 2001 and 2004 and in the reworking of that material between the end of 2003 and the middle of 2004. Over this period the research was supported by the School of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania, by a Large Grant from the Australian Research Council (from 2001-2003), and by a six-month stay, from May to October of 2004, at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where I was fortunate enough to be able to resume the Humboldt Fellowship that I had originally held at the University of Heidelberg in 1998-1999.
I would like to thank the University of Tasmania and Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität Munich, as well the Australian Research Council and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the support they have given this project. Special thanks are also due to a number of individuals: Andrew Benjamin, Ed Casey, Bert Dreyfus, Stuart Elden, Joseph Fell, Karl Homann (my host in Munich), Marcelo Stamm (who deserves special thanks and acknowledgment for his generosity in allowing my wife and myself to use his Munich apartment during the time this book was written), Peter Steiner, Reinhard Steiner, James Phillips (for being one of my best-ever postgraduate students and also for assisting with the final corrections and revisions), and Julian Young (for many long discussions on dwelling and other topics over the years and for much else besides).
A note on referencing: Except in a few cases in which the English text appears in a dual English/German edition, all references in the text to English translations of Heidegger’s works are followed by a reference to the original German source in parentheses—where the relevant volume appears in Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), the reference is given as GA followed by volume number and page number, for example: (GA, 13:84).