One of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, a philosopher whose ideas shaped modern psychology and even architecture, was also a card-carrying member of one of history's darkest regimes and lived a private life built on explosive secrets. This deep dive holds both realities at once in examining Martin Heidegger. It begins in the rural Catholic town of Messkirch in 1889, where his father was the church sexton, follows his brief Jesuit training cut short by heart trouble, and traces how Franz Brentano's writing on Aristotle ignited a lifelong obsession with the question of being. As Edmund Husserl's assistant at Freiburg, Heidegger took the tools of phenomenology and pointed them at gritty everyday existence.

The episode covers the labyrinth of his personal life: a son born in 1920 to his wife Elfride whose biological father was a fa ...