field is not spherically complete then there exist nonzero locally convex vector spaces which do not have a single nonzero continuous linear form. Although much progress has been made to overcome this problem a really nice and complete theory which to a large extent is analogous to classical functional analysis can only exist over spherically complete field8. I therefore allowed myself to restrict to this case whenever a conceptual clarity resulted. Although I hope that thi8 text will also be useful to the experts as a reference my own motivation for giving that course and writing this book was different. I had the reader in mind who wants to use locally convex vector spaces in the applications and needs a text to quickly gra8p this theory.