 The principal impetus for contemporary hermeneutics, then, is a new use Heidegger makes of hermeneutics in his early phenomenological inquiries into what, in Being and Time, he calls the ‘being’ or also, the ‘existentiality,’ of human ‘existence’ (Heidegger, Being and Time, § 7, section C). Heidegger’s philosophy is oriented by the question of the meaning, or, sense of being (die Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins), but as he argues in Being and Time, inquiry into this question itself begins with inquiry into the sense in which human beings can be said to be or exist (Heidegger, Being and Time, §§ 1–4). Heidegger defines inquiry into the sense of the being of human existence as hermeneutical, that is, as a matter of self-interpretation. Within this context, Heidegger leaves behind the idea that hermeneutics is primarily concerned with the methods or foundations of research in the arts and humanities. Rather, as he argues, such hermeneutical research is itself only possible because human beings are, in their very being, interpretive. For Heidegger, understanding is a mode or possibility of human existence, and, indeed, one that is projective, oriented toward the interpretive possibilities available to us in the situations in which we find ourselves (see especially Heidegger, Being and Time, §§ 31–32). Accordingly, inquiry into the sense of the being of human existence is enacted in our own attempts to understand our own being, as we may interpret our being through the course of our affairs.