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Martin Heidegger

Born in Germany in 1889, Martin Heidegger is widely considered to be one of the greatest, and at the same time the most controversial, philosophers of the twentieth century. He began his life as a Roman Catholic, and even joined the Jesuit order as a novice but had to be dismissed shortly thereafter due to poor health. Yet this same man, by the end of his life would turn his back on the Catholic system and would be hailed as a significant influence on new schools of thought such as existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction and, what he is most identified with, phenomenology. Heidegger would also become a committed member of the Nazi Party in 1933, and this involvement would affect the way he was viewed by his peers for many if not all the remaining years of his life.

Heidegger studied under philosopher Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. And although Heidegger would become a phenomenologist himself, his works slowly diverged from his teacher. Heidegger’s main interest was ontology, defined as the study of being. His most famous publication is Being and Time, a dauntingly difficult yet brilliant work in which he tackles a basic question of ontology: what does it mean to say an entity is?

Web Resources On Martin Heidegger

IEP: Martin Heidegger
Wikipedia: Heidegger

Book Resources On Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger by George Steiner
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

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