most important book is Le Jeu du Monde (The Play of the World), where Axelos argues for a pre-ontological status of play. Because of this activity and connection to major European intellectual figures, Axelos played a central role in French and European intellectual life for over 50 years. Philosophical work Kostas Axelos tried to reconcile the ancient thinking of Heraclitus with the modern thinking of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and others in order to gain a new perspective on some of the problems of Marxism during his time. Axelos used Heraclitus' philosophy as the primary basis for assessing the work of Marx and Engels. Axelos contributed to the growing interest of contemporary researchers in the Pre-Socratics, and generally for ancient Greek philosophy, through his reading of the role of concepts in interpreting the world. Axelos' starting point was the argument in Marx's thesis that "the world's becoming philosophical is at the same time philosophy's becoming worldly, that its realization is at the same time its loss" In his dissertation Marx, the Man Who Thinks Through Technique and in his work Alienation, Techne, and Praxis in the Thought of Karl Marx, Axelos draws heavily on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, reading them with the help of Heidegger's and Nietzsche's concepts. He explored the consequences of "alienation" in history, such as the effects of the division of labor, private property and capital, in terms of the "externalization" of human beings in an "alien reality." Axelos tried to relate these descriptions of alienation and loss of "play" to Heidegger's concept of technological "enframing as standing-reserve [bestand]. For Axelos, this expanded understanding of technology became a way of interrogating both modern society and Marxism Following the example of his teacher Heidegger, who employed a poetic style of philosophy, Axelos often used a continuous flow of aphoristic statements to relate phenomena together, attempting to listen to "the game of the world". Using this method to approach the "horizons of the world," Axelos unpacks the "mythological elements" of Marxism and especially criticizes tendencies toward meta-narrative that he considers nihilistic and anthropocentric. Axelos' two doctoral theses and his book Towards Planetary Thinking (1964) were arranged as a trilogy—The Unfolding of Errance. Axelos continued to engage with contemporary thinking and the emerging global world by seeking to discover the "unseen horizon encircling all things" (1964), further refining his method as a continuous wandering through the splintered "wholeness" that