But he somehow managed to write books that are as powerful and as original as Spinoza’s or Hegel’s. Heidegger was a resentful, ungenerous, disloyal and deceitful man. For those who care about philosophy, however, things are not that simple. Many people who learn that Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) lied over and over again about his Nazism, and that he did his best to ignore the murder of the European Jews, conclude that his writings can be neglected. Reseña de Rorty en el New York Times de la obra de Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Written by a master of Heidegger's philosophy, the book is one of the best introductions to the thought and to the life and times of the greatest German philosopher of the century.One of the greatest Western philosophers was also a Nazi The best intellectual biography of Heidegger ever written and a best-seller in Germany, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil does not shy away from full coverage of Heidegger's shameful transformation into a propagandist for the National Socialist regime nor does it allow this aspect of his career to obscure his accomplishments. A chronicle of ideas and of personal commitments and betrayals, Safranski's biography combines clear accounts of the philosophy that won Heidegger eternal renown with the fascinating details of the loves and lapses that tripped up this powerful intellectual.

Rudiger Safranski chronicles Heidegger's rise along with the thought he honed on the way, with its debt to Heraclitus, Plato, and Kant, and its tragic susceptibility to the conservatism that emerged out of the nightmare of Germany's loss in World War I.

Soon he turned apostate and sought a university position, which set him on the path to becoming the star of German philosophy in the 1920s. Heidegger grew up in Catholic Germany where, for a chance at pursuing a life of learning, he pledged himself to the priesthood. The story of Heidegger's life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this brilliant biography. One of the century's greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler.

Martin Heidegger by Rüdiger Safranski