Degree: Master of Arts Abstract: This thesis explores the potential for interpreting the work of Martin Heidegger as a resource for social and critical philosophy. I begin by intervening in the debate between Axel Honneth and Raymond Geuss on the usefulness of Heidegger in the recent re-activation of the problem of ‘reification.’ According to Honneth’s reading Being and Time critiques the epistemological model of subjectivity at the root of reification and provides a positive account of a more primordial way of being. I am skeptical of whether or not Being and Time should be understood this way, but nevertheless affirm that the anthropological implications of Heidegger’s ontology can benefit social and critical philosophy. I argue that Heidegger’s description of the way in which the world is first disclosed through pre-reflective practical activity implies how it can be that a human agent is both limited by its worldly conditions and yet still able to modify them.