Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose Being and Time (1927) reshaped 20th-century continental philosophy, driving phenomenology toward existentialism and hermeneutics. His lifelong project was to reawaken the question of Being (ontology in the philosophical sense — the study of what it means to be) which he argued Western metaphysics had forgotten. His legacy is gravely complicated by his Nazi Party membership (1933–1945) and his refusal to clearly repudiate it afterward.
Core ideas
- The question of Being. Philosophy since the Greeks studied particular beings but forgot Being itself — what it means for anything to be. Reviving that question is Heidegger’s aim.
- Dasein & being-in-the-world. He analyzes human existence as Dasein (“being-there”) — always already in-the-world, practically engaged, thrown into a situation — not a detached mind confronting an external object. This directly overturns the Cartesian subject: there is no worldless “I think” to start from; understanding is situated before it is theoretical (see mind-body-problem).
- Later turn: technology and language. His later work critiques modern technology as enframing (Gestell) — a way of disclosing the world that reduces everything to standing-reserve — and turns to language and poetry as other ways of letting Being show itself.
In the conversation
Heidegger is the founding corpus’s 20th-century pivot. He takes up Nietzsche (the subject of major lecture courses), reading him as the last metaphysician and the thinker of nihilism; and he defines himself against Descartes, replacing the detached thinking subject with being-in-the-world. His “ontology” is the study of Being — a homonym of the CS/semantic-web “ontology,” not that. Source: Wikipedia (T2, tertiary — page Being and Time / SEP for depth).
Related
nihilism · mind-body-problem · friedrich-nietzsche · rene-descartes · western-philosophy