Heidegger, Martin (1889-1976)

German philosopher. He believed that Western philosophy had ‘forgotten’ the fundamental question of the ‘meaning of being’ and, in Sein und Zeit/Being and Time (1927), analysed the different types of being appropriate to people and to things in general. He lectured and wrote extensively on German and Greek philosophy, and in the later part of his career focussed his attention on the nature of language and technology. His work was an important influence upon the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Heidegger was born in Messkirsch, Baden, Germany, and was educated at the University of Freiburg, where he studied theology and then philosophy, with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. He taught mainly at the University of Freiburg and, in 1933, when he was made University Rector, gave an inaugural address in which he praised the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of Hitler's National Socialist Party. In the same year he became a party member, and, though he resigned from the party and the rectorate ten months later, was subsequently banned from university teaching from the end of World War II until 1951.

Heidegger's lectures on other philosopher's works were almost all organized around an attempt to repose the question of the ‘meaning of being’ which he addressed in Being and Time. Before and during World War II, he lectured mainly on modern philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche, but he later turned his attention to such Pre-Socratic thinkers as Parmenides, Aristotle, and Heraclitus. His published works include Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1973); a four volume study of Nietzsche (1954-61); Hegel's Concept of Experience (1970); and On the Way to Language (1959); as well as a number of essays and books on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. His lectures on technology are collected in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1977).