Martin Heidegger

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Martin Heidegger

Heidegger in 1960

Born 26 September 1889

Mekirch, Baden, German Empire

Died 26 May 1976 (aged 86)

Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wrttemberg, Federal

Republic of Germany

Nationality German

Education Collegium Borromaeum (de)

(19091911)[1]

Alma mater University of Freiburg

(PhD, 1914; Dr. habil. 1916)
Era 20th-century philosophy

Region Western philosophy

School Phenomenology

Hermeneutics

Ontological hermeneutics[2]

Hermeneutic phenomenology (early)[3]

Transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology (late)[4]

Existentialism

Existential phenomenology[5]

Institutions University of Marburg

University of Freiburg

Main Ontology
interests Christian philosophy

Metaphysics

Art

Greek philosophy

Technology

Language

Poetry

Thinking

Notable Heideggerian terminology

ideas
Dasein

Gestell

Ontotheology

Ontological difference (Ontologische Differenz)

Existentials (Existenzialien)

Ekstase
Sigetics (Sigetik)

Hermeneutic circle

Aletheia

Disclosure

Fundamental ontology

Forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit)

Dwelling (Wohnen)

Language as the vehicle through which the question

of Being can be unfolded[6]

"Language speaks"

Art's ability to manifest the "essential strife" between

"earth and world...the world grounds itself on the earth

and the earth juts through the world...the world, in

resting upon the earth, strives to raise the earth

completely [into the light]. As self-opening, the world

cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as

sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the

world into itself." [7]

Influences[show]

Influenced[show]

Martin Heidegger (/hadr, -dr/;[12] German: [matin had]; 26 September 1889 26

May 1976) was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and
philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is
"widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th
century".[6] Heidegger is best known for his contributions to phenomenology and existentialism,
though as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cautions, "his thinking should be identified
as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification".[13]
His first and best known book, Being and Time (1927), though unfinished, is one of the central
philosophical works of the 20th century.[14] In the first division of the work, Heidegger attempted
to turn away from "ontic" questions about beings to ontological questions about Being, and
recover the most fundamental philosophical question: the question of Being, of what it means
for something to be. Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that
has an understanding of Being, and asks the question about it, namely, Human being, which
he called Dasein ("being-there"). Heidegger argued that Dasein is defined by Care, its
practically engaged and concernful mode of Being-in-the-world, in opposition
to Rationalist thinkers like Ren Descartes who located the essence of man in our thinking
abilities. For Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday
practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the
most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of
discovering the world. In the second division, Heidegger argues that human being is even more
fundamentally structured by its Temporality, or its concern with, and relationship to time,
existing as a structurally open "possibility-for-being." He emphasized the importance
of Authenticity in human existence, involving a truthful relationship to our thrownness into a
world which we are "always already" concerned with, and to our Being-towards-death, the
Finitude of the time and being we are given, and the closing down of our various possibilities
for being through time.[15]
Heidegger also made critical contributions to philosophical conceptions of truth, arguing that its
original meaning was unconcealment, to philosophical analyses of art as a site of the revelation
of truth, and to philosophical understanding of language as the "house of being."[16] Heidegger's
later work includes criticisms of technology's instrumentalist understanding in the Western
tradition as "enframing," treating all of Nature as a "standing reserve" on call for human
purposes.[15][17] Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for his affiliation with Nazism,
as Rector of the University of Freiburg for 11 months, before his resignation in April 1934, for
which he neither apologized nor publicly expressed regret,[18] although in private he called it
"the biggest stupidity of his life" (die grte Dummheit seines Lebens).[19]