Heidegger (whom Monty Python slandered as "a boozy beggar who could think you under the table") wrote almost unreadably abstruse tomes such as his masterpiece "Being and Time"(1927). Even an encyclopedia summary of that book had me nodding off. Though short on answers, Heidegger was a dab hand at posers, his best being: "Why is there anything at all and not rather nothing?" Considered a father of Existentialism, Heidegger denied the paternity. Yet Sartre and his frères popularized some of these ideas to the point where by the 1950s they could be discussed in espresso bars by beatniks listening to bongos.

¶ 10:31 PM