Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was born at Messkirch in the Black Forest. At the University of Freiburg he studies philosophy with Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenological method for inquiry into the immediate data of experience exerted a lasting influence on Heidegger's own highly original work. In 1923 Heidegger became professor at Marburg. Five years later he succeeded his former mentor Husserl (to whom Being and Time is dedicated) at Freidburg, where he was then elected rector (president) of the University. Although Heidegger did not consider himself an existentialist, he inspired French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre as well as many philosophers in both the phenomenological and analytic traditions. He has also drawn his share of both philosophical and personal criticism. In a famous 1923 article, "The Elimination of Metaphysics," the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap used Heidegger as a supposed example of "philosophical nonsense," and he has been criticized for being a Nazi sympathizer. More recently, in the influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Richard Rorty called Heidegger one of the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century (along with Dewey and Wittgenstein).

bio by Daniel Kolak in Lovers of Wisdom
(Wadsworth, 1997)