Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is ‘widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century’. Heidegger is best known for his contributions to phenomenology and existentialism, though as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy cautions, ‘his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification’.