Werner Stegmaier was the founding director of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Greifswald, Germany. He has published on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levinas, Derrida, and Luhmann. He is the author of the philosophy of orientation.