Richard PoltThinkers

Martin Heidegger held that theoretical truth is secondary to our non-theoretical openness to beings.

Martin Heidegger is interested in finding a way of understanding life that does not theoreticize it; a non-theoretical science, a genuine primordial science, from which the theoretical itself takes its origin.

Martin Heidegger is a practitioner of thinking as pure activity; a passion which not so much rules and oppresses all other capacities and gifts, as it orders them and prevails through them.

Martin Heidegger is a thinker for whom phenomenology is an empty label - but its emptiness is a virtue, since it leaves us room for developing approaches that are appropriate to what we are examining.

Martin Heidegger is a transcendental thinker insofar as Being is a condition of the possibility of our experience of entities: whenever we encounter an entity in any way, we must already have an understanding of Being that makes this encounter possible.

Martin Heidegger is anti-cartesian in that where Descartes claims we need to prove the ‘world’ in which we are supposed to be engaged is countered by Heidegger by his suggesting that “ontology precedes epistemology” — in other words, “knowing” is a mode of Dasein founded upon Being-in-the-world. Thus Being-in-the-world, as a basic state, must be Interpreted beforehand”.

Martin Heidegger is not implying that all human activity can ultimately be reduced to some kind of productive manipulation of tools. There are many human activities that are not equivalent to using things in order to produce a useful result: for example, making a political decision, having a conversation with one's spouse, playing the cello, exploring a glacier, or studying calculus.

Martin Heidegger is interested in the activity of using and making over and above the activities of studying and knowing, which are more specialized and less "everyday" activities.

Martin Heidegger tries to move us away from thinking of the world purely in mathematical terms, and towards an understanding of the world in terms of appropriateness and inappropriateness.

Martin Heidegger is no a skeptic who claims that we cannot know anything because we are locked into our particular prejudices or a radical relativist who says that any interpretation is as true as any other. On the contrary, he claims we must never allow our presuppositions "to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather [we must work out] these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.

Martin Heidegger is not a proponent of subjecivity, for him, objectivity does not mean the complete absence of prejudice and points of view. Instead, true objectivity involves a willingness to revise ones point of view in the light of what one discovers. Responsible interpreters approach things with presuppositions, but also adjust their presuppositions to the things.

Martin Heidegger is a writer for whom, when reading, it should be kept in mind that the point is not to listen to a series of propositions, but rather to follow the movement of showing.

Martin Heidegger is making no claim about the afterlife when discussing death as the possibility of the impossibility of existing.

Martin Heidegger is a historicist if we mean by this that there is no truth that is not relative to a historical period, the label is correct.

Martin Heidegger is critical of Sartre on the grounds that freedom is to be thought of primarily in terms of unconcealment, rather than in terms of self-determination, (as does Sartre).

Martin Heidegger is no postmodernist. He a centripetal thinker, always seeking the center, the gathering power of Being. Postmodernists are centrifugal, exploring the margins of meaning, hoping to practice an ethics and politics that are not about an "ownmost" possibility, but about "the other".