ABSTRACT
In Martin Heidegger the biography and the course of thinking are virtually coterminous. Everything about his family and youth bespeaks the simplicity of a farming town on the eastern edge of the Black Forest, which Heidegger himself celebrated in his essay "The Pathway". His earliest formal education took place at the local public schools in Messkirch. Just after his fourteenth birthday a promising future as a priest sent young Martin to the Jesuit secondary school at Konstanz, where he spent three years followed by three more at the Jesuit Bertholds-Gymnasium in Freiburg. Besides offering Heidegger an extensive access to the philosophical texts of the tradition and an introduction to the concept of the onto-theological structure of metaphysics, the work seems to have started him on the path of searching out the etymology of fundamental concepts. Marburg needs both a professor to teach phenomenology and a professor familiar with the history of medieval philosophy-and Martin Heidegger would be two in one.
