Throughout the 1920s, the divide between analytic and continental philosophy became more entrenched, but also more complicated. An illuminating episode that was fundamental to the perpetuation of the idea of philosophy being a “divided house” is the analytic reaction to the phenomenologist/ontologist Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and his text “What is Metaphysics?” his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg in 1929 (see Heidegger 1996a). In the course of this work, Heidegger develops a substantive nothing (given a definite article as “the Nothing”), and has it act (it “noths”, or “nihilates”). Unsurprisingly, this is something of a natural target for an analyst who views misuse of language as a path to metaphysical confusion, and Heidegger's work is used as an example in Carnap's 1932 positivist manifesto, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” The introductory remarks make it clear that Heidegger is standing in for a tradition here:

Carnap then presents a table of different grammatical constructions in Heidegger, detailing Heidegger's usages of “Nothing” in comparison with acceptable ordinary sentences with the same surface grammar and acceptable semi-logical sentences with a different underlying grammar.