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Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976)

Among philosophers of time, Martin Heidegger is one of the most famous. He describes humans as essentially temporalthat is, as “beings in time.” Bringing together philosophical currents including phenomenology, philosophy of life, hermeneutics, and ontology, he developed a new philosophy he called Existentialism. His interpretation of the history of philosophy is critical for understanding his works.

Life and Works

Born on September 26, 1889, in Messkirch, in southwestern Germany, Heidegger intended to become a Roman Catholic priest, but after 2 years of theological studies at Freiburg University he switched to mathematics and natural sciences, finally taking a doctorate in philosophy (1913). After completing his postdoctoral thesis, Die Kategorien und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (Doctrine of Categories and Theory of Meaning in Duns Scotus), Heidegger broke with classical Catholic philosophy in 1919 and became an assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In 1923 he was appointed professor at Marburg University and in 1927 Heidegger published Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), regarded as one of the most important and at the same time most controversial books in philosophy. He returned to Freiburg one year later as Husserl's successor, where, in 1929, he published three influential books: Vom Wesen des Grundes (On the Essence of Ground), Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics), and Was ist Metaphysik (What is Metaphysics).

Heidegger's most controversial years were from 1933 to 1945. As a conservative and staunch anti-Communist, he supported some aspects of Hitler's policies and was elected rector of Freiburg University on April 29, 1933. He joined the party shortly afterwardless out of conviction and more to strengthen his position, and although he never embraced Hitler's anti-Semitism, he remained vague about his relationship with the Nazis even after the war. More positively, as rector he prohibited anti-Jewish posters in the university and protected the Jewish professors Hevesy and Thannhauser. He shared a close personal friendship with the Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt in 1925 and again after 1950. His major work Being and Time is dedicated to Edmund Husserl, his Jewish predecessor at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger's tenure as rector lasted less than a year, as he was forced to resign after refusing to remove two deans in disfavor with the Nazis. While he never renounced the party, his distance from it was clear in 1944 when he was declared expendable from the university and sent to dig trenches along the Rhine. The relatively few publications from this period include his important essays on Plato's concept of truth (1942–1943). Heidegger's “philosophical turn,” which may have begun during the 1930s, seems more evident after the war in his books on Nietzsche and the English publication in 1950 of Off the Beaten Track {Holzwege). The nature of this turn is contested among scholars, but the theme of philosophical inquiry as a continuous path of understanding is especially appropriate for Heideggerone that he used repeatedly to describe his own work. He died in 1976 and was buried in Messkirch.

Philosophy of Being and Time

The title of Heidegger's renowned work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) describes the book's key insight about the essential temporality of human existence. In the book, he reveals a remarkably original philosophy that required a whole new vocabulary in order to transcend inadequate understandings of human existence. His lifelong philosophical project attempted to correct a perceived deficiency of Western philosophies from Plato (427–347 BCE) until the rationalistic and scientific worldviews of the 20th century. Many of those philosophies provide great insight into the human condition, especially the classic works of Plato and Aristotle, but according to Heidegger they went astray by inadequately explaining human existence as the precondition for all understanding.

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