When I took political philosophy decades ago and then taught it even a little bit decades ago,

it seems to me we began to play it out and ended with Nietzsche. You studied Heidegger and

teach Heidegger. Why Heidegger? Barton Heidegger, I should say, is full name, 20th century,

German philosopher. I don't teach him in the introduction in the basic political philosophy,

of course, is because he's maybe too difficult and too remote. But he's really, I think, Heidegger,

the most significant thinker of the 20th century. One thing that he is the teacher of other people,

some of whom are, in a way, better known now, Hannah Arrent, Leo Strauss, to a degree,

Jacob Klein, who's the prime mover of the St. John's Great Books program,

Hans Gattemer, who's one of the chief authors, you might say, of certain kinds of literary criticism

and philosophical criticism. He's also the ground of the existentialism, which used to be popular,

Jean-Paul Sartre, and so on. So one thing that makes Heidegger so important is that he's the

source of much of the significant thinking after him, either following him or reacting to him,

but sometimes unacknowledged source, right? The construction and all that French stuff,

isn't that really Heidegger? Yeah, it's Heidegger. It's a literary criticism.

Heidegger's view of Nietzsche and Nietzsche. A lot of it, he's the unacknowledged source of,

sometimes he's acknowledged, but only half acknowledged, the complete reliance of many people on Heidegger,

something they like to disguise, and at some point, they even probably forget. But he's fundamental

in all those ways simply in terms of other thinkers. For, let's say, Strauss and Klein, he opened up

a serious effort and ability to look again at Plato and Aristotle in their own terms. Heidegger

taught lots of Aristotle in the early 1920s. So that's one reason he's significant.

More fundamentally, he's, of course, significant because of what he himself did.

His first great work and really his greatest work, Being in Time, published in 1927, completed

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