Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976) was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics.

One of the most important philosophers of the 20th century was a professor in Marburg and Freiburg, and worked as an assistant to Edmund Husserl, whose place he inherited after Husserl's retirement. Heidegger's students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Gunther (Stern) Anders, and Hans Jonas. In his 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. He 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." Heidegger is best known for his contributions to phenomenology and existentialism and his brief engagement in Hitler's national-socialist movement (when appointed as Rector of Freiburg) is a subject of constant interest and discussion, as well as his love affair with a Jewish student and later prominent philosopher Hannah Arendt during the 1920s.

Some of his most important works are Sein und Zeit (1927), Was ist Metaphysik? (1929), Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959). 

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