Philosophers
Martin Heidegger
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A German philosopher who studied under Edmund Husserl at Freiburg and succeeded him in the chair of philosophy there, best known for Being and Time (1927), which reopens the ancient question of the meaning of Being through an analysis of Dasein, human existence as the one kind of being for whom its own being is always already an issue. Heidegger described Dasein as thrown into a world of practical concern it did not choose, as absorbed for the most part in an inauthentic, everyday preoccupation with things and with what others expect, and as capable of a more authentic relation to its own existence only by confronting its own being-toward-death. Heidegger's philosophy shaped nearly all of twentieth century continental philosophy even though he himself rejected the label existentialist. His brief but consequential membership in the Nazi Party in 1933, while serving as rector of Freiburg, and his refusal after the war to offer any clear public reckoning with it, remain a central, unresolved controversy in how his philosophy should be read.
Facts
TraditionPhenomenology, fundamental ontology, continental philosophy 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Arendt studied under Heidegger at Marburg in the 1920s. Their relationship, and its long and complicated aftermath through his 1933 Nazi Party membership and her own postwar response to it, has been extensively documented and debated by biographers and philosophers.
Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology argues technology is never a merely neutral means.
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Works Attributed
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1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Informations.v. Martin HeideggerQuote, s.v. Martin Heidegger
His influence has extended far beyond the bounds of academic philosophy, and his existential analysis of human existence has inspired theorists in fields as diverse as theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, aesthetics, literary criticism, political science, strategic management, and cognitive science.
1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and InformationAssociated With: Phenomenology, entry: Phenomenology; Heidegger's Being and Time, 1927View the Source Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Associated With: Continental Philosophy, category: Continental PhilosophyView the Source Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
In Branch: Metaphilosophy, entry: Metaphilosophy, IntroductionQuote, In Branch: Metaphilosophy, entry: Metaphilosophy, Introduction
The later thought of Heidegger advocates a postmetaphysical thinking too, albeit a very different one; and Heidegger associates metaphysics with the ills of modernity.
The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger)
Associated With: Philosophy of Technology, Technology Studies reader, p. 2Quote, Associated With: Philosophy of Technology, Technology Studies reader, p. 2
we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Associated With: Hannah Arendt
Most mainstream scholarship treats Heidegger's philosophical work, including the analysis of Dasein that shaped Arendt's own thinking, as separable in principle from his 1933 Nazi Party membership and his postwar refusal to disavow it clearly. French philosopher Emmanuel Faye argued the opposite in a widely debated 2005 study, translated into English in 2009 as Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, contending that Nazi ideology is embedded in the philosophy itself, not merely in the biography beside it, and that Heidegger's work should be reclassified and read accordingly. The dispute bears directly on how to read Arendt's own complicated postwar relationship with her former teacher, which her biographers and critics have argued about on similar terms.
A dissenting reading, from Emmanuel Faye and the case that Heidegger's philosophy cannot be read apart from his politicsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information
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