Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher whose Being and Time is one of the foundational texts of twentieth-century continental philosophy. His fundamental question was the "question of Being" — what does it mean for anything to be at all? — and he argued that Western philosophy had forgotten this question by focusing on beings rather than Being itself. Through an analysis of human existence (Dasein) — its structure of care, its being-toward-death, its thrownness into a historical world — Heidegger sought to recover a more original experience of being.

His involvement with National Socialism — his rectorship of Freiburg University in 1933 and his lifelong failure to adequately repudiate Nazism — remains a source of intense controversy. His later work, turning toward a meditative engagement with poetry, technology, and language, has been enormously influential in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and continental philosophy.