I hadn't looked at Heidegger before and it's now clear I had the wrong impression of him. I'd always lumped him in with the Existentialists but it turns out he had a completely different idea of what philosophy should be about. In essence, Heidegger thinks that Western philosophy has taken a wrong turn as regards understanding the nature of being.
I have a lot of sympathy with Heidegger's way of thinking about things, and many of his ideas seem somehow familiar. So I wasn't that surprised to learn he had studied the Tao Te Ching - even working on a German translation.
I was also interested to find, while trawling the internet, that Heidegger's work is influencing developments in AI:-
[I]n order for an AI to get past this crucial problem of contextual relevance, they would need to be imbued with particular “bodily needs” in order so that the AI could “cope” with the world. In other words, these AI need to be embodied and embedded in the world so that there is a particular significance for the program, or else it will never be able to act intelligently in the world. You can’t develop a truly artificial intelligence based on pure symbol shunting because the significance of the world stems not from our brain “processing” symbolically, but rather from the entire referential totality of culture. We can’t escape from the fact that our intelligence results from persons coping with an environment.Some people even blog about it.
