Summary

Martin Heidegger was Husserl’s most prized protege. Heidegger traced many of his ideas back to his formative childhood, especially sitting in his father’s workshop and walking through the forest. He sat on a bench in the woods to think through any philosophy he was reading, and later he gave his own works titles like Forest Paths and Trailmarks. Heidegger investigated philosophical topics by asking a flurry of questions, then suddenly combine all of their answers into a stunning explanation.

In his major work Being and Time, he notes that Being is not a concept that can be defined. What can be said is that the conscious entity “I” has a particularly strong Being. A prominent focus of his writing is the concept of Dasein, the idea of being there. He chooses to write about Dasein in commonplace moments, but with a strange...