Heidegger

From Geography

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and is seen as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. He was seen as quite a controversial person. Not only as an academic, but also because of his involvement with Nazism. For a full biography see [1].

Heidegger was a philosopher who's main interest was the question of human existence, the relationship between human being and the world. His most well known attribution to the 20th century philosophy is the disctinction between 'Being' and 'Dasein'. His theory about Being started with the observation that philosophy over the years has paid attention to all things that can be found in our world. Heidegger introduced the 'question of being' about what being actually is.

Edmund Husserl argued that all philosophy should be a description of experience. For Heidegger this meant understanding that experience is already situated in a world, an ontological [2] approach of things. Heidegger argues that to describe experience properly, one should find the being for whom such a description matters. For this he introduces the term Dasein, the being for whom being is a question. Dasein is the condition for the possibility for anything like a philosophical anthropology. So Dasein is Being in an ontological sense.

References:

- Cloke, P., Philo, C. & Sadler, D. (1999). Approaching Human Geography. London: Paul Chapman.

- Malpas, J. (2008). Heidegger, geography and politics. Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2 (185-213).

By Evelien de Beer & Richard Huttinga