The reception of Heidegger's reflections on modern science is shadowed by the question of Heidegger's competence to utter the judgments he makes concerning science. The question is important because Heidegger offers notoriously tendentious judgments on the sciences, making statements as damning as the provocative claim in Was heißt Denken?, "Science does not think,"¹ or emphasizing the "impotence of the sciences"² to underscore the inability of the sciences to represent their own essence to themselves on scientific terms.