Martin Heidegger Philosopher

• Gender: Male
• Citizenship: Germany
• Born: Sep 26, 1889
• Died: May 26, 1976

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher, widely seen as a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition, particularly within the fields of existential phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. From his beginnings as a Catholic academic, he developed a groundbreaking and widely influential philosophy. His relationship with Nazism has been a controversial and widely debated subject.

For Heidegger, the things in lived experience always have more to them than what we can see; accordingly, the true nature of being is “withdrawal”. The interplay between the obscured reality of things and their appearance in what he calls the “clearing” is Heidegger's main theme. The presence of things for us is not their being, but merely their being interpreted as equipment according to a particular system of meaning and purpose. For instance, when a hammer is efficiently used to knock in nails we cease to be aware of it. This is termed 'ready to hand', and Heidegger considers it an authentic mode. The 'time' in the title of his best-known work, Being and Time, refers to the way that the given features are interpreted in the light of their possibilities.