ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger is the hidden master of modern thought. His influence on thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century, though often unspoken, is all pervasive, especially in that mélange in the humanities known curiously as ‘theory’. Heidegger’s work touches the deepest, usually unconsidered assumptions of all work of thought, forming a reassessment of the drive to knowledge itself. In the second half of the twentieth century it was often under Heidegger’s direct or indirect influence that the traditional view that intellectual and scientific inquiry, the search for truth, is inherently disinterested, or even critical of unwarranted forms of authority, gave way to arguments that the drive to know is often compromised by elements of domination and control. Heidegger died in 1976 at the age of eighty-six, and his work has become even more prominent since that time, especially in continental Europe where the decline of Marxism has brought Heidegger’s radical critique of Western thought to a new prominence.
