Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger
Heidegger in 1960
Born	26 September 1889 Meßkirch, Baden, German Empire
Died	26 May 1976(1976-05-26) (aged 86) Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Federal Republic of Germany
Nationality	German
Education	Collegium Borromaeum () (1909–1911)
Alma mater	University of Freiburg (PhD, 1914; Dr. habil. 1916)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Phenomenology Hermeneutics Ontological hermeneutics Hermeneutic phenomenology (early) Transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology (late) Existentialism Existential phenomenology
Institutions	University of Marburg University of Freiburg
Main interests	Ontology Metaphysics Art Greek philosophy Technology Language Poetry Thinking
Notable ideas	Heideggerian terminology Dasein Gestell Ontotheology Ontological difference () Existentials () Ekstase Sigetics () Hermeneutic circle Aletheia Disclosure Fundamental ontology Forgetfulness of Being () Dwelling (Wohnen) Language as the vehicle through which the question of Being can be unfolded "Language speaks" Art's ability to manifest the "essential strife" between "earth and world...the world grounds itself on the earth and the earth juts through the world...the world, in resting upon the earth, strives to raise the earth completely [into the light]. As self-opening, the world cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself."
Influences Anaximander Aristotle Augustine Brentano Dilthey Meister Eckhart Hartmann Hegel Heraclitus Hölderlin Husserl Jaspers Kant Kierkegaard Laozi Lask Nietzsche Jakob von Uexküll Parmenides Plato Rickert Duns Scotus Thomas of Erfurt Count Yorck
Influenced Agamben Arendt Beaufret Badiou Blanchot Borgmann Bultmann Derrida Dreyfus Dugin El-Bizri Foucault Gadamer Hans Jonas Kopić Kuki Levinas Löwith Marcel Marcuse Marion Merleau-Ponty Nancy Norberg-Schulz Patočka Pirjevec Rorty Sartre Schürmann Sloterdijk Stiegler Strauss

Martin Heidegger (/ˈhaɪdɛɡər, -dɪɡər/;German: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century." Heidegger is best known for his contributions to phenomenology and existentialism, though as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cautions, "his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification."

His first and best known book, Being and Time (1927), though unfinished, is one of the central philosophical works of the 20th century. In the first division of the 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. Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that has an understanding of Being, and asks the question about it, namely, Human being, which he called Dasein ("being-there"). Heidegger argued that Dasein is defined by Care, its practically engaged and concernful mode of Being-in-the-world, in opposition to Rationalist thinkers like René Descartes who located the essence of man in our thinking abilities. For Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. In the second division, Heidegger argues that human being is even more fundamentally structured by its Temporality, or its concern with, and relationship to time, existing as a structurally open "possibility-for-being." He emphasized the importance of Authenticity in human existence, involving a truthful relationship to our thrownness into a world which we are "always already" concerned with, and to our Being-towards-death, the Finitude of the time and being we are given, and the closing down of our various possibilities for being through time.