Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose groundbreaking work in ontology and metaphysics determined the course of 20th-century philosophy on the European continent and exerted an enormous influence on virtually every other humanistic discipline, including literary criticism, hermeneutics, psychology, and theology.
Biography of Martin Heidegger, German philosopher of Being and major 20th‑century thinker, covering his life, key works, concepts, and controversial legacy.
Learn the core concepts of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in simple, easy-to-follow language. Explore topics like truth, reality, being, authenticity, and technology with clear examples and contrasts to thinkers like Descartes, Sartre, Nietzsche, and more.
Videos designed to help you understand Martin Heidegger's philosophy. Includes lectures on Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy of the Event, Introduction to Metaphysics, and much more.
Few philosophers in the 20th century have had as profound an impact as Martin Heidegger. His ideas reshaped the way we think about being, time, and the nature of human existence.
In November 1933, Heidegger signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State. Heidegger resigned from the rectorate in April 1934 and pursued a teaching agenda aligned with Nazi cultural politics until 1945. [25]
Because Heidegger focuses his inquiry on the sense or meaning of being, many interpreters of Heidegger attribute to him the so-called “intelligibility interpretation of being”—that is, the view that “what Heidegger means by ‘being’ just is intelligibility” (McDaniel 2016: 307).
Heidegger’s main interest was ontology or the study of being. In his fundamental treatise, Being and Time, he attempted to access being (Sein) by means of phenomenological analysis of human existence (Dasein) in respect to its temporal and historical character.