Let us take seriously Heidegger's (and not just Heidegger's) insight that any systematic phenomenological inquiry necessarily also involves historical reflection, or what he comes to call the "destruction" of the tradition. That means that our phenomenological reflection must be accompanied by an explicit turn back to the historical developments that have proceeded us and set parameters within which our reflections and discussions are undertaken. It also means that our turn back to the history of philosophy can only be genuinely fruitful if it is phenomenological, i.e. if it is guided by the issues at stake in our analyses and if we are constantly asking ourselves what experiences must have been guiding the texts that we are concerned with. If this is so, then it is appropriate that many of the papers assembled in this volume take as their point of departure some figure or figures who have already reflected upon the issues at stake in the conference, in this case the question of values. We turn to figures whose work has influenced the kind of "default assumptions" that we ourselves start with in our attempt to come to terms with these issues.