The Life and Philosophy of Martin Heidegger

The brilliant and notorious genius who birth the Continental Philosophical paradigm

Existentialism is a “movement” which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard center. That center is the thought of Heidegger. To that thought alone existentialism owes its importance or intellectual respectability.

— Leo Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 2, no. 1 (1971)

The word “is”, is a stealthy term that slips its way into every nook and cranny of our language without the slightest notice on our part. For all this prominence, or perhaps because of this all-too-close nature, few people ever ask: what is is?

According to Martin Heidegger this is not just a forgetfulness on the part of you or me but of the entire Western philosophical tradition over the past two and a half thousand years. The question of Being has been utterly neglected since the work of Aristotle. Before Aristotle, in the primordial days of philosophy’s infancy, we find philosophers from Plato and Parmenides to Heraclitus and Anaximander asking this fundamental question.

After millennia of neglect, Martin Heidegger made it his life’s work to ask just this…