ABSTRACT
German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was educated in the phenomenological tradition under Edmund Husserl. While Heidegger has remained a controversial figure, largely because of his political affiliations with the National Socialists, he has proved to be a key figure within twentieth-century European thought and a significant influence on other thinkers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. Following the publication in 1927 of his seminal work, Being and Time, Heidegger pursued the whole problem of humankind’s situatedness in the world, in a project centred on the key concepts of dasein and the question of ‘Being’. Heidegger argued that the alienation of contemporary existence was based on the separation of thought from ‘Being’, a condition epitomized by the privileging of technology and calculative thinking in the modern world. His project was therefore an attempt to return humankind to some form of authentic existence.
