ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in Messkirch, Germany. Unable to pursue the priesthood because of poor health, Heidegger's study of Christian theology and medieval philosophy-after courses in physics and mathematics drew him toward a lifelong devotion to philosophy. Being and Time was Heidegger's attempt to start philosophy over again, to return to the pre-Socratic insights into being lost with the advent of the rationalistic metaphysics of Plato. Heidegger had joined the Nazi Party, reluctantly or not, but he apparently never resigned. Though within the Continental tradition of philosophy known as existentialism, Heidegger strove to free philosophy from what he claimed were its millennia-old metaphysical shackles. Using complex and arcane terminology, he sought to penetrate the nature of the confrontation of the human being with being itself and to clear a way for the answer to the age-old question of why there is something rather than nothing.
