Martin Heidegger
pp. 91-105
in: Terrell Carver, James Martin (eds), Palgrave advances in continental political thought, Berlin, Springer, 2006Abstract
Martin Heidegger was born in 1889, near the Black Forest of southern Germany. As a student he studied theology and philosophy at the University of Freiburg, where Edmund Husserl served as his mentor. Later, while teaching at the University of Marburg, he produced Being and Time (1927), the work that earned him Husserl's chair at Freiburg in 1928, and in 1933 he became Rector. During this period and until 1945 Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party, an affiliation he never explained or recanted. Major figures who studied with Heidegger include Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas and Herbert Marcuse. His legacy for political theory emerges most clearly in the deconstructive approach of Jacques Derrida and the genealogical method of Michel Foucault, each of whom represents a distinct aspect of Heidegger's thought. He died in 1976.
