Martin Heidegger's Changing Destinies

A portrait of Martin Heidegger as a man and a philosopher In this biography of Martin Heidegger (18891976), now available in English, historian Guillaume Payen synthesizes the connections between the German philosophers life and work. Critically, but without polemics, he creates a portrait of Heidegger in his time, using all available sourceslectures, letters, and the notorious black notebooks. Payen chronicles Heideggers changing destinies: after the First World War, an uncompromising Catholicism gave way to a vigorous striving for a philosophical revolutionfertile ground for National Socialism. The book reflects a life of light and shadow. Heidegger was a great philosopher and teacher who cultivated friendships and love affairs with Jews but also was an anti-Semitic nationalist who lamented the Judaization of German intellectual life.