1889: Martin Heidegger is born

On 26 September 1889, Martin Heidegger was born in the small town of Messkirch in southwestern Germany. The son of a sexton, he would become one of the twentieth century’s most influential—and controversial—philosophers. His 1927 masterpiece Being and Time dismantled traditional notions of detached, representational knowledge and replaced them with a picture of human existence as always already embedded in a practical world of tools, projects and moods.

Heidegger argued that we primarily encounter things as “ready-to-hand”—as equipment that withdraws into the flow of skilled activity—rather than as objects we first perceive and then reason about. Understanding, on this view, is not the manipulation of internal symbols but a form of absorbed coping. This insistence on embodiment, context and practical know-how would later prove explosive for artificial intelligence.

In the 1960s and 1970s the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, drawing explicitly on Heidegger (and on Merleau-Ponty), mounted a sustained critique of the dominant symbolic AI paradigm. Dreyfus claimed that rule-based systems could never capture the background of shared practices that make human intelligence possible. His books, especially What Computers Can’t Do, forced the field to confront the limits of disembodied cognition and helped open the door to alternative approaches.

Those approaches—behaviour-based robotics, situated cognition, enactivism and today’s embodied and neuromorphic systems—still carry a Heideggerian imprint. Researchers building robots that learn by moving through physical environments, or theorists debating whether large language models “understand” anything, are in many ways still arguing with the questions Heidegger posed more than a century ago. The birth of a provincial German philosopher on this day in 1889 remains an unexpected landmark in the long intellectual prehistory of AI.