Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, a rural Catholic town in southwestern Germany. His upbringing was humble; his father was a sexton. Young Heidegger was initially headed for the priesthood – he even started seminary – but he developed an intense interest in philosophy (spurred by reading Brentano) and switched to studying that at the University of Freiburg. He earned his doctorate and then worked under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology.

By the 1920s, Heidegger’s own philosophical ideas were taking shape. In 1927, he published Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), a groundbreaking and notoriously difficult work. In it, Heidegger essentially asks the question: What is the meaning of Being? Philosophers had long discussed beings (entities), but Heidegger wanted to revive the question of Being itself – what does it mean for something to exist? He starts with the human mode of being, which he calls Dasein (literally “Being-there”).

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