Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heideggerwas a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the IEP, he is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century." Heidegger is best known for his contributions to Phenomenology and Existentialism, though as the SEP cautions, "his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification."...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth26 September 1889
CountryGermany
...Before considering the question that is seemingly always the most immediate one and the only urgent one, What shall we do? we ponder this: How must we think? For thinking is genuine activity, genuine taking a hand, if to take a hand means to lend a hand to...the coming to presence of Being.
We still by no means think decisively enough about the essence of action.
What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.
If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.
he who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors
Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.
Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.
The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.
To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.
The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
So it's clear from whence the history of philosophy is the inner movement of the course of spirit, that is, of absolute subjectivity, towards itself.
Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.
The senses do not enable us to cognize any entity in its Being; they merely serve to announce the ways in which 'external' Things within-the-world are useful or harmful for human creatures encumbered with bodies....they tell us nothing about entities in their Being.