Heidegger reads the history of Western metaphysics as a series of epochs in which philosophers elaborated different interpretations of the being of entities – for example, being as idea in Plato, as energeia in Aristotle, right down to being as eternal recurrence of the same in Nietzsche. Each epoch of metaphysics is characterized by its understanding of the presence of entities and its oblivion of the absence/finitude that makes possible (or “dispenses”) that presence. For Heidegger, the last and climactic phase in this “history of being” is our own epoch of technology and nihilism.
(Thomas Sheehan. “Martin Heidegger”. In A Companion to the Philosophers. Second, revised edition. Edited by Roben L. Arrington. Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, p. 114.)