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.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was the most influential European philosopher of the twentieth century and remains its most contested. Born in Messkirch in southwestern Germany, he studied with Husserl and Rickert at Freiburg, succeeded Husserl in the philosophy chair there in 1928, and joined the Nazi Party as rector of the university in 1933 — a political affiliation he never adequately repudiated and that has shadowed every subsequent reception of his work.

Being and Time (1927), Heidegger's masterpiece, is an existential analytic of Dasein — the kind of being for whom being is a question. The book reframes the philosophical task as the recovery of the question of being from a Western metaphysical tradition that, on Heidegger's account, has systematically forgotten it. Anxiety, mortality, authenticity, throwness, and being-toward-death are all elaborated as constitutive structures of Dasein rather than as features of a subject confronting an objective world.

Heidegger's later work — the Letter on Humanism, the essays on technology and on the work of art — turns from the analysis of Dasein to a more direct meditation on the history of being. The Black Notebooks, published from 2014 onward, have made the antisemitism in Heidegger's private thought undeniable. His philosophical influence on Sartre, Arendt, Levinas, Derrida, and Foucault is impossible to overstate; the moral and political reckoning with him remains an open question.