As part of his ontological project, Heidegger undertakes a reinterpretation of previous Western philosophy. He wants to explain why and how theoretical knowledge came to seem like the most fundamental relation to being. This explanation takes the form of a destructuring (Destruktion) of the philosophical tradition, an interpretive strategy that reveals the fundamental experience of being at the base of previous philosophies that had become entrenched and hidden within the theoretical attitude prevalent in the history of philosophy in its metaphysics of presence. Such ""destruktion"", is to be read not only in its negative sense but also in the positive sense of recovery. In Being and Time he briefly destructures the philosophy of Descartes though the second half of the book which was intended to be a Destruktion was never written; in later works he uses this approach to interpret the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Plato, among others. This technique exerted a profound influence on Derrida's deconstructive approach, although there are very important differences between the two methods.