The Essentials of Essentialism

Paper Summary:

A look at Heidegger's main teachings focusing on the essential aspects of his essentialism. The paper then explores his criticisms of Jean-Paul Sartre's far more famous version of existentialism as well as examines the ways in which " despite Heidegger's criticism of Sartre " the two are in many ways the same.

From the Paper:

"Heidegger, like all modern philosophers (and possibly the ancient ones as well), incorporated the work of a number of earlier thinkers into his own formulation of existentialism and his understanding of the nature of reality of the place of humans in the world. As an existentialist, Heidegger believed in a philosophy that was relatively concrete, that is concerned with addressing the place of people in the world, dealing with concrete, real problems. This is a cornerstone of existentialism, this insistence upon the reality of existence in a real world, and an existence moreover that is marked by no Cartesian dualism. Heidegger (along with Sartre and other existentialists) would soundly reject the kinds of ideas about consciousness that were promulgated by Descartes, a form of human consciousness that hovers somewhere outside of consciousness and that is used to intuit or to infer the existence of other things in the world."

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