German Philosopher
September 26, 1889 - May 26, 1976

Philosophy

Heidegger is one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century. Heidegger's ideas have penetrated into many areas. His discussion of ontology has led to his being often cited as one of the founders of existentialism and his ideas inspired major philosophical work, e.g., Sartre, who adopts many of Heidegger's ideas (although Heidegger insisted that Sartre misunderstood him). His philosophical work was taken up throughout Germany, France, and Japan and has gained, since the 1970s at least, a fair following in North America as well. Heidegger's work was scorned and dismissed, however, by many of his contemporaries, such as the Vienna Circle, Theodor Adorno, and Anglo-American philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Alfred Ayer.

Heidegger's refusal to recognize fashionable concepts such as the fact-value distinction, his criticisms of logic, modern science, and technology, and his refusal to include an "ethical" dimension to his theory, and claiming that doing so amounted to a fundamental misunderstanding of his thought, often puzzled and confused philosophers. Thus he has been attacked on these points and in regards to his political and personal behavior.


Influences

Heidegger was influenced as a teenager by Aristotle mediated through Christian theology. The concept of being, in this traditional sense, dating back to Plato, was his first exposure to an idea he would plant at the core of his most famous work Being and Time (1927). He was originally a phenomenologist. To oversimplify, phenomenologists approach philosophy by attempting to perceive experience unmediated by prior knowledge and abstract theoretical assumptions. Edmund Husserl was its founder and major exponent. In fact, Heidegger studied under Husserl and it was this that persuaded him to become a phenomenologist. Heidegger became interested in the question of being (or what it means to be). His famous work Being and Time is characterized as phenomenological ontology. The idea of being dates back to Parmenides and has traditionally served as one of the key thoughts of Western philosophy. The question of being was revived by Heidegger after being eclipsed by the metaphysical tradition from Plato to Descartes, and more recently in the Enlightenment. He tried to ground being in time, and thus discover its real essence or meaning, that is, its intelligibility for us.

Thus Heidegger began where being began — in ancient Greek thought, resurrecting a lost, under-appreciated issue in contemporary philosophy. Heidegger's great opening was to take Plato seriously again, and at the same time undermine the entire Platonic world by challenging the core of Platonism — treating being not as timeless and transcendent, but as immanent in time and history. This is partially why Platonists tend to regard Heidegger as a great thinker, even if they disagree with his analysis of Being and conception of Platonic thought. Although Heidegger was a supremely creative and original thinker, he also borrowed heavily from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, the latter of whom goes mostly unacknowledged by Heidegger. Heidegger can be compared to Aristotle, who took Plato's dialogues and systematically presented them as treatises and concepts. Similarly, Heidegger extracted Nietzsche's unpublished fragments and interpreted them as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics. Heidegger's published lectures during 1936 on Nietzsche’s Will to Power as Art are less scholarly commentaries than original philosophical works in their own right. Heidegger's concepts of angst and Da-sein draw on Kierkegaard's notions of anxiety, the importance of subjective relation to the truth, existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world.


Being and Time

Being and Time (German title: Sein und Zeit), published in 1927, is Heidegger's most influential work. This epochal book was his first significant academic work, and earned him a professorship at Freiburg University. He subsequently changed his views on several points made in the book. It is a touchstone of Continental philosophy, a groundbreaking investigation of the concepts of Being & Da-sein (literally "existence" and often translated by its components, "being-there"), as these relate to ontology and phenomenology. Although Heidegger distanced himself from existentialism, Being and Time strongly influenced existentialist thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre.

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