Heidegger, Martin

German philosopher. He believed that Western philosophy had ‘forgotten’ the fundamental question of the ‘meaning of being’ and, in Sein und Zeit/Being and Time (1927), analysed the different types of being appropriate to people and to things in general. He lectured and wrote extensively on German and Greek philosophy, and in the later part of his career focussed his attention on the nature of language and technology. His work was an important influence upon the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Heidegger was born in Messkirsch, Baden, Germany, and was educated at the University of Freiburg, where he studied theology and then philosophy, with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. He taught mainly at the University of Freiburg and, in 1933, when he was made University Rector, gave an inaugural address in which he praised the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of Hitler's National Socialist Party. In the same year he became a party member, and, though he resigned from the party and the rectorate ten months later, was subsequently banned from university teaching from the end of World War II until 1951.