Chapter 1 deals with Immanuel Kant. It “…presents Kant’s philosophy as a foundation for understanding…Heidegger and Whitehead.” (MOS 2) Smith then delineates his new way of reading Kant as a postmodern thinker, which we’ll get to when we look directly at chapter 1.
Chapter 2 sets out Heidegger’s project. Heidegger rethinks the analysis of a knowing, substantial subject, as it has been taken for most of western history, and transforms it via an existential analysis of “Dasein.” This summary of Heidegger I’m sure readers will find complete-but it is very compact (but this is Heidegger-there’s probably no way around this).