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Which Heidegger? Unsurprisingly, the author "Heidegger" has been read in many different ways. It has often been said, there are many Heideggers. • A Heidegger of German idealist philosophy, preoccupied with abstruse but fundamental questions of time, death, and the underlying anxiety or Angst of human living ... • A scholarly Heidegger, "central to European philosophy", intersecting major currents of 20th century thought, interrogating philosophy's "great traditions" ... • A theological Heidegger, taken to have offered a philosophical foundation for modern Christian thought ... • ... and some Heideggers who disclaim this: one thoroughly secular, and another of post-theology, responding to the "death of God" while searching out what remains of religious thought in mystic traditions, Eastern religions, etc. 6
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Against Heidegger The question of being? A senseless querying of what must be an absolute presupposition. If treated as a question there is no way of answering it ... Heidegger has displays of surprising ignorance, unscrupulous distortion and what can fairly be described as charlatanism. British analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer in 1982 Heidegger's writings contain the last despairing glimmer of German romantic philosophy. His major work Being and Time is formidably difficult - unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it. British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in 1992 7

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Which Heidegger?

Unsurprisingly, the author "Heidegger" has been read in many different ways. It has often been said, there are many Heideggers.

• A Heidegger of German idealist philosophy, preoccupied with abstruse but fundamental questions of time, death, and the underlying anxiety or Angst of human living ...

• A scholarly Heidegger, "central to European philosophy", intersecting major currents of 20th century thought, interrogating philosophy's "great traditions" ...

• A theological Heidegger, taken to have offered a philosophical foundation for modern Christian thought ...

• ... and some Heideggers who disclaim this: one thoroughly secular, and another of post-theology, responding to the "death of God" while searching out what remains of religious thought in mystic traditions, Eastern religions, etc.

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