Vienna Circle positivists used Heidegger’s lecture as proof that metaphysics is meaningless.

Evidence

In his inaugural lecture, Heidegger had found an approach to the question of Nothingness which seemed partly contrived and partly fanciful, and which built on word-play, examples of which Rudolf Carnap, the best known of the Vienna Circle neo-positivists, used as evidence of the meaninglessness of metaphysical questions. The lecture presented human beings as more or less vulnerable to attack. Freed from everything which might have been sacred to reason, they must be prepared to sacrifice themselves for something of which nothing more was known than that it demanded severity and privationand how this was known remained unexplained. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 415

Categorization

• XREF: Carnap’s famous 1932 paper ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics’ drew on this same lecture — connects to analytic-continental split and its institutional history. — connects to: Carnap read Heidegger’s Nothingness lecture as proof metaphysics is meaningless — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 120
• SEED: An essay on how one inaugural lecture became the founding canon both for existentialism and for its positivist refutation — a single text generating two opposed philosophical traditions.