About the Author
Rüdiger Safranksi, born in Kottweil, Germany, in 1945, is a
renowned scholar of philosophy. As a young man, he worked in a
home for troubled youths before entering the university, where he
studied German literature, philosophy, history, and art history, and
taught at the Free University of Berlin before beginning a distin-
guished career as a writer and critic in 1985. His previous books, all
the Wild Years of Philosophy (1991) *nà Martin Heidegger Between Good and
EM (1998), both of which are available in English, λ biography of
Ε. T. A. Hoffmann, and other philosophical works. Praising the
Heidegger biography, Richard Rorty commented in the New York
Times Book Bevies 'It is the first comprehensive biography of the man,
and supersedes both Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism and Hugo
Otfs Martin Heidegger: A Political Life:' Over the course of the last
decade, Safranski has been awarded the Friedrich Merker Prize for
Essays (1995), the Wilhelm Heine Medal of the Mainz Academy
(1996), the Ernst Robert Curtius Prize (1998), and die Friedrich
Nietzsche Prize (2000). He lives in Berlin.
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