Martin Heidegger

He died in 1976 and was buried in the Messkirch cemetery beside his parents and brother.

Martin Heidegger was born in Messkirch, Germany, to Friedrich Heidegger and Johanna Kempf. His father was the sexton of the village church, which is why Heidegger was brought up in a household of stringent religious beliefs.

Initially, his parents could not afford university education so he was enrolled at a Jesuit seminary but because of his psychosomatic heart condition, Heidegger was asked to leave the program.

From 1909 to 1911, Heidegger studied theology at the University of Freiburg and later changed his subjects to philosophy. By now he had left Catholicism because with his newly attained philosophical views, Catholicism did not make much sense.

He attained his doctoral degree after finishing his thesis on psychologism, inspired by Neo-Thomism and Neo-Kantianism and completed his venia legendi in 1916. He started working as Privatdozent and then as a German soldier during World War I.

After working as a salaried assistant to Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger was honored with an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg in 1923.

In 1927, Heidegger published his foremost work ‘Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)’ and became the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg in the following year, after Husserl retired.

In spite of its virtually tightly packed obscurity, the work earned Heidegger acknowledgment as one the world’s chief philosophers.

Heidegger's later works include: ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (‘On the Essence of Truth’) 1930’, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (The Origin of the Work of Art) 1935’, ‘Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik (Introduction to Metaphysics (1935)’, Bauen Wohnen Denken (Building Dwelling Thinking) 1951’, etc.

He was made the rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933 and later joined the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. In his speeches and addresses, he started to openly support the German revolution and appreciate Adolf Hitler.

‘Sein und Zeit (Being and Time)’, published in 1927, is Heidegger’s first academic book and is considered to be his most important work. The book investigates the question of ‘being’ through themes such as mortality, care, anxiety, temporality, and historicity.