Why is the example of the philosopher Martin Heidegger so important?

Heidegger was very influential for many of the figures examined in my book, as well as for Continental thought more generally. He takes Nietzsche’s challenge to philosophy (discussed above) and makes it more philosophically potent. Nietzsche was, after all, trained as a classical philologist, and so his main target is Platonism, rather than Cartesianism or Kantianism–the whole edifice of modern philosophy (i.e., epistemology, subject-object split, correspondence theory of truth) that Heidegger goes after. Even such a Nietzschean as Foucault remarks that (in an interview I cite in my book) “I had tried to read Nietzsche in the 1950s, but Nietzsche by himself didn’t hold much interest for me. But Nietzsche and Heidegger, that was a philosophical shock!”

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