Martin Heidegger in the context of Existentialists

German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, and the Frankfurt School, who now count among the most famous and studied philosophers of all time. They are central to major philosophical movements such as rationalism, German idealism, Romanticism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, logical positivism, and critical theory. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often also included in surveys of German philosophy due to his extensive engagement with German thinkers.

Heraclitus (/ˌhɛrəˈklaɪtəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἡράκλειτος Hērákleitos; fl. c. 500 BC) was an ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from the city of Ephesus, which was then part of the Persian Empire. He exerts a wide influence on Western philosophy, both ancient and modern, through the works of such authors as Plato, Aristotle, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger.

Little is known of Heraclitus's life. He wrote a single work, of which only fragments survive. Even in ancient times, his paradoxical philosophy, appreciation for wordplay, and cryptic, oracular epigrams earned him the epithets "the dark" and "the obscure". He was considered arrogant and depressed, a misanthrope who was subject to melancholia. Consequently, he became known as "the weeping philosopher" in contrast to the ancient atomist philosopher Democritus, who was known as "the laughing philosopher".

Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practising ideas. This has been a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paulo Freire, Murray Rothbard, and many others. It has meaning in the political, educational, spiritual and medical realms.

Existentialism is a family of philosophical views and inquiry that explore the human individual's struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of existence. In examining meaning, purpose, and value, existentialist thought often includes concepts such as existential crises, angst, courage, and freedom.

Existentialism is associated with several 19th- and 20th-century European philosophers who shared an emphasis on the human subject, despite often profound differences in thought. Among the 19th-century figures now associated with existentialism are philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, all of whom critiqued rationalism and concerned themselves with the problem of meaning. The word existentialism, however, was not coined until the mid 20th century, during which it became most associated with contemporaneous philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Tillich, and more controversially Albert Camus.

Jacques Derrida (/dɛrɪˈdɑː/; French: [ʒak dɛʁida]; born Jackie Élie Derrida; 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was a French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disavowed the word "postmodernity".

During his career, Derrida published over 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He has had a significant influence on the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, law, anthropology, historiography, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, music, architecture, and political theory.

Luce Irigaray (born 3 May 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examines the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. She is considered one of the founders of French difference feminism.

Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions (1982) can be read as a response to Merleau‐Ponty's article “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible, and in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (1999), Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air.

Henry Corbin (14 April 1903 – 7 October 1978) was a French philosopher, theologian, and Iranologist, professor of Islamic studies at the École pratique des hautes études. He was influential in extending the modern study of traditional Islamic philosophy from early falsafa to later and "mystical" figures such as Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, and Mulla Sadra Shirazi. With works such as Histoire de la philosophie islamique (1964), he challenged the common European view that philosophy in the Islamic world declined after Averroes and Avicenna.

Born into a Catholic family, he converted to Protestantism between 1927 and 1930. He received a Catholic education, obtaining a certificate in Scholastic philosophy from the Catholic Institute of Paris at age 19. Three years later he took his "license de philosophie" under the Thomist thinker Étienne Gilson. He studied modern philosophy, including hermeneutics and phenomenology, becoming the first French translator of Martin Heidegger. On 13 October 1929, Louis Massignon (director of Islamic studies at the Sorbonne) introduced him to Suhrawardi, the 12th-century Persian Muslim thinker. In a late interview, Corbin said: "through my meeting with Suhrawardi, my spiritual destiny ... was sealed. Platonism, expressed in terms of the Zoroastrian angelology of ancient Persia, illuminated the path that I was seeking." He thus dedicated himself to understanding Iranian Islam, which he believed esoterically expressed older perennial insights related to Zoroastrianism and Platonism.

The University of Freiburg (colloquially German: Uni Freiburg), officially the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (German: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), is a public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The university was founded in 1457 by the Habsburg dynasty as the second university in Austrian-Habsburg territory after the University of Vienna. Today, Freiburg is the fifth-oldest university in Germany, with a long tradition of teaching the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences and technology and enjoys a high academic reputation both nationally and internationally. The university is made up of 11 faculties and attracts students from across Germany as well as from over 120 other countries. Foreign students constitute about 18.2% of total student numbers.

The University of Freiburg has been associated with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Carnap, David Daube, Johann Eck, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Friedrich Hayek, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Meinecke, Edith Stein, Paul Uhlenhuth, Max Weber and Ernst Zermelo. As of October 2020, 22 Nobel laureates are affiliated with the University of Freiburg as alumni, faculty or researchers, and 15 academics have been honored with the highest German research prize, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, while working at the university.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is a qualitative form of psychology research. IPA has an idiographic focus, which means that instead of producing generalization findings, it aims to offer insights into how a given person, in a given context, makes sense of a given situation. Usually, these situations are of personal significance; examples might include a major life event, or the development of an important relationship. IPA has its theoretical origins in phenomenology and hermeneutics, and many of its key ideas are inspired by the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. IPA's tendency to combine psychological, interpretative, and idiographic elements is what distinguishes it from other approaches to qualitative, phenomenological psychology.

In philosophy, temporality refers to the idea of a linear progression of past, present, and future. The term is frequently used, however, in the context of critiques of commonly held ideas of linear time. In social sciences, temporality is studied with respect to the human perception of time and the social organization of time. The perception of time in Western thought underwent significant changes in the three hundred years between the Middle Ages and modernity.

Examples in continental philosophy of philosophers raising questions of temporality include Edmund Husserl's analysis of internal time consciousness, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, J. M. E. McTaggart's article "The Unreality of Time", George Herbert Mead's Philosophy of the Present, and Jacques Derrida's criticisms of Husserl's analysis.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on May 1, 1933, ten days after being elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. A year later, in April 1934, he resigned the Rectorship and stopped taking part in Nazi Party meetings, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until its dismantling at the end of World War II. The denazification hearings immediately after World War II led to Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg, banning him from teaching. In 1949, after several years of investigation, the French military finally classified Heidegger as a Mitläufer or "fellow traveller." The teaching ban was lifted in 1951, and Heidegger was granted emeritus status in 1953, but he was never allowed to resume his philosophy chairmanship.

Heidegger's involvement with Nazism, his attitude towards Jews and his near-total silence about the Holocaust in his writing and teaching after 1945 are highly controversial. The Black Notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941, contain several anti-semitic statements, although they also contain statements where Heidegger appears extremely critical of racial antisemitism. After 1945, Heidegger never published anything about the Holocaust or the extermination camps, and made one sole verbal mention of them, in 1949, whose meaning is disputed among scholars. Heidegger never apologized for anything and is known to have expressed regret once, privately, when he described his rectorship and the related political engagement as "the greatest stupidity of his life" ("die größte Dummheit seines Lebens").

Authenticity is a concept of personality in the fields of psychology, existential psychotherapy, existentialist philosophy, and aesthetics. In existentialism, authenticity is the degree to which a person's actions are congruent with their values and desires, despite external pressures to social conformity. The conscious self comes to terms with the condition of Geworfenheit, of having been thrown into an absurd world (without values and meaning) not of their own making, thereby encountering external forces and influences different from and other than the Self. Authenticity has emerged as a central concept in contemporary models of well-being and the good life, serving as a foundational principle in many leading psychological frameworks. A person’s lack of authenticity is considered bad faith in dealing with other people and with one's self; thus, authenticity is in the instruction of the Oracle of Delphi: “Know thyself.” Concerning authenticity in art, the philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno held opposing views and opinions about jazz, a genre of American music; Sartre said that jazz is authentic and Adorno said that jazz is inauthentic. Many musical subcultures require artistic authenticity, lest the community consider an artist to be a poseur for lacking authenticity (creative, musical, or personal); artistic authenticity is integral to many genres of music, including but not limited to genres of rock (such as punk rock and heavy metal), club music (such as house and techno), and hip-hop.

In the 18th century, Romantic philosophers recommended intuition, emotion, and a connection to Nature as the necessary counterbalances to the intellectualism of the Age of Enlightenment. In the 20th century, Anglo–American preoccupations with authenticity centered on the writings of existentialist philosophers whose native tongue is not English; therefore, the faithful, true, and accurate translation of the term existentialism was much debated, to which end the philosopher Walter Kaufmann assembled a canon of existentialist philosophers. Kaufmann's canon includes the Dane Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the German Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and the Frenchman Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). For these existentialists, the conscious Self comes to terms with existence (being and living) in an absurd, materialist world featuring external forces, e.g. Geworfenheit (Thrown-ness), and intellectual influences different from and other than the Self.

Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur (/rɪˈkɜːr/; French: [ʁikœʁ]; 27 February 1913 – 20 May 2005) was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gabriel Marcel. In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory."

Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (French: L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes published with the subtitle A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, is a 1943 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In the book, Sartre develops a philosophical account in support of his existentialism, dealing with topics such as consciousness, perception, social philosophy, self-deception, the existence of "nothingness", psychoanalysis, and the question of free will.

While a prisoner of war in 1940 and 1941, Sartre read Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), which uses the method of Husserlian phenomenology as a lens for examining ontology. Sartre attributed the course of his own philosophical inquiries to his exposure to this work. Though influenced by Heidegger, Sartre was profoundly skeptical of any measure by which humanity could achieve a kind of personal state of fulfillment comparable to the hypothetical Heideggerian "re-encounter with Being". In Sartre's account, man is a creature haunted by a vision of "completion" (what Sartre calls the ens causa sui, meaning literally "a being that causes itself"), which many religions and philosophers identify as God. Born into the material reality of one's body, in a material universe, one finds oneself inserted into being. In accordance with Husserl's notion that consciousness can only exist as consciousness of something, Sartre develops the idea that there can be no form of self that is "hidden" inside consciousness. On these grounds, Sartre goes on to offer a philosophical critique of Sigmund Freud's theories, based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious.

Aletheia or Alethia (/ælɪˈθaɪ.ə/; Ancient Greek: ἀλήθεια) is truth or disclosure in philosophy. Originating in Ancient Greek philosophy, the term was explicitly used for the first time in the history of philosophy by Parmenides in his poem On Nature, in which he contrasts it with doxa (opinion).

It was revived in the works of 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger. Although it is often translated as "truth", Heidegger argued that it is distinct from common conceptions of truth.

Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (/ˌmɜːrloʊ ˈpɒnti/ MUR-loh PON-tee; French: [mɔʁis mɛʁlo pɔ̃ti]; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.

At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. He was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the twentieth century to engage extensively with the sciences. It is through this engagement that his writings became influential in the project of naturalising phenomenology, in which phenomenologists use the results of psychology and cognitive science.