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Heidegger and Being

Philosophy is a comprehensive summary of man's adventure of perceiving the universe. This perception expresses itself concretely in science, art, and social life with various projections. Philosophy, by intertwining with these projections, acquires a structure that feeds them and in time begins to feed itself from those structures. The accumulation that emerges in this cycle is humanity's experience of civilization.


At one point in this great experience, a German named Martin Heidegger emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and stated that in this process of gaining experience starting from Plato and Aristotle, many philosophical concepts and theories were created based on the concept of "being (zein/being). However, he determined that Western philosophy was "rootless" by claiming that the definition of the concept of "being" itself had been overlooked for 2000 years. Starting with these ideas, he became one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century and his teacher was Husserl, one of the important names of the phenomenology school.


Heidegger writes his work "Zein und Zeit/Being and Time" and writes one of the masterpieces of the world of philosophy. It is an extremely heavy work. It is a book that even those who have studied philosophy have difficulty understanding and interpreting.

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As for me, I looked for data to feed myself with a curious approach to the philosophical foundations of science in Being and Time. For example, I tried to understand what the struggle between the "earth" and the "world" that Heidegger expressed in another work of his called "Poetry, Language, Thought" contributed to the development of natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, etc. and at what points this process worked.


Questions concerning today's natural and social sciences come to my mind. Could it be that the underlying reason for global warming or the problems experienced by the capitalist economy today is that science has failed to serve humanity sufficiently due to the neglect of the definition of the concept of "being" as claimed by Heidegger?

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Could it be that an ontological error in thought, due to the concept of "being" not being sufficiently understood, has caused very fundamental errors in the conceptual construction of many sciences? If we are faced with such a reality, how can we explain Heidegger's philosophical mistake in becoming a member of the National Socialist Party between 1933-45, as a philosopher who demonstrated the necessity of defining the concept of being? Was he forced to do something for his own "being"?



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