Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889, in Messkirch, a small town in the Black Forest region of Baden, Germany, the son of sexton and master cooper Friedrich Heidegger and Johanna Kempf. Raised in a devout Catholic household, he entered a Jesuit novitiate in 1909 but withdrew within weeks for reasons of health and instead studied theology and then philosophy at the University of Freiburg, where he completed his doctorate in 1913 and his habilitation on Duns Scotus in 1915.

After serving briefly in a meteorological unit at the end of the First World War, Heidegger became Edmund Husserl's assistant at Freiburg in 1919. He taught at Marburg from 1923 to 1928 and there published Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927, an unfinished but immensely influential work that recast the question of being through the existential analytic of Dasein. He returned to Freiburg in 1928 to succeed Husserl in the chair of philosophy.

In April 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and accepted election as rector of the University of Freiburg, delivering a notorious inaugural address; he resigned the rectorship the following year but never publicly renounced his earlier commitments. After the war a French-led denazification committee banned him from teaching until 1949. Later writings — Letter on Humanism, The Question Concerning Technology, What Is Called Thinking?, and the Black Notebooks published posthumously — pursued language, technology, and the history of being.

He married Elfride Petri in 1917; they had two sons, and his decades-long affair with student Hannah Arendt is a documented part of his biography. He died in Freiburg on May 26, 1976.

The name Martin stems from the Latin Martinus, formed from Mars, the Roman god of war, and conveys the sense warlike or of Mars. A masculine name long associated with saints and reformers, it suits a thinker whose questioning shook twentieth-century philosophy.