ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger is generally regarded as the most important Continental philosopher of the twentieth century and, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the two greatest philosophers of that century. Deeply influenced by Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological school of philosophy, Heidegger instituted a radical rethinking of the most basic concepts by means of which Western philosophers had attempted to cognize the structure of all that exists, one that he claimed would dissolve the central puzzles of the Western philosophic tradition. Despite the difficulty of his writing and the obscurity of some of his claims, the breadth of his vision and the depth of his insights make Heidegger a crucial figure.
