Martin Heidegger 1889 – 1976

Martin Heidegger was a 20th-century German philosopher whose 1927 work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) is one of the most influential texts of contemporary continental philosophy. He developed an ontology of Dasein, the being for whom being is a question, and analyses of authenticity, anxiety, and being-toward-death that decisively shaped existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. He served as rector of the University of Freiburg from 1933 to 1934, joined the Nazi Party that year, and was banned from teaching for several years after the war; the relation between his political associations and his philosophy remains a subject of intensive scholarly debate. His later work turned toward the history of being, language, and the Pre-Socratics. His influence on Sartre, Arendt, Gadamer, Levinas, and Derrida has been profound.