By taking on too much material, the final chapter lacks focus and ends the book on a low note.Ģ. Aside from almost plagiarizing the work of Aschheim, the topic is too large to be covered in one chapter. Acknowledges shortcomings in Nietzsche's thought and how they led his sullied reputation during the post-war period.ġ. Lacks any glaring distortions of Nietzsche's philosophy. Stays focused on Nietzsche's philosophy and doesn't get sucked into the petty details of his life or those of the age he lived in.ģ. Safranski outlines Nietzsche's thought in clear, elegant prose requiring little previous philosophical background to understand.Ģ.

Great introductory biography for those unfamiliar with Nietzsche's life and writings. 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.A biography with clear cut pros and cons. 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. R diger 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.

Heidegger safranski