Martin Heidegger
“Of all beings, only the human being, called upon by the voice of being, experiences the wonder of all wonders: that beings are.”
Martin Heidegger, Postscript to What is Metaphysics
Martin Heidegger: An Introduction to His Thought, Work, and Life
An excerpt from the Introduction to A Companion to Heidegger, edited by Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall
Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His work has been appropriated by scholars in fields as diverse as philosophy, classics, psychology, literature, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, religious studies, and cultural studies. At the same time, he is a notoriously difficult philosopher to understand. The way he wrote was, in part, a result of the fact that he is deliberately trying to break with the philosophical tradition. One way of breaking with the tradition is to coin neologisms, that is, to invent words which will, in virtue of their originality, be free of any philosophical baggage. This is a method that Heidegger frequently employed, but at the cost of considerable intelligibility. In addition, Heidegger believed his task was to provoke his readers to thoughtfulness rather than provide them with a facile answer to a well defined problem. He thus wrote in ways that would challenge the reader to reflection.
See also:
Great Thinkers
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“God is near, yet hard to seize.
Where there is danger,
The rescue grows as well.”
