This dissertation is a study of the thought of Martin Heidegger. It is an investigation of how Heidegger conceives and carries out the task of educating human beings to a life determined by philosophic questioning. Through an exposition of recently published lecture courses that Heidegger delivered in the years 1928-1935, his main work, Being and Time , and his rectoral address, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitaet (1933), it is shown that the task of education is central in Heidegger's understanding of philosophy. A pedagogical intention is essential to Heidegger's discourse in all its forms: lecture course, treatise and public address. This determines the philosopher's relation to students, readers, and the public generally. The task of education is here shown to have a broad scope. In this study, a continuity is revealed to subsist between Heidegger's effort to engender a "living philosophizing" in the existence of students and his conception of the role of philosophy in the political life of peoples, a role that, in 1928 and afterwards, is defined as a form of "leadership." The examination of the aims, necessity, character, method and limits of Heidegger's philosophic pedagogy thus opens a perspective on the political implications of Heidegger's thought as he himself understood them. The importance of the theme of education in Heidegger's thought has not been adequately recognized in the extensive scholarship on this thinker. This is due in part to the fact that the important texts--upon which this study is based--have only very recently appeared in the ongoing publication of Heidegger's collected works. Through this study, I hope to make a contribution to our understanding of the relation of philosophy and politics in Heidegger by approaching this question from the standpoint of Heidegger's central philosophic and pedagogical aims. It is also to be hoped that my discussion of previously unknown works by this great thinker may prove useful to the reader.
