20th-century philosophy
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| Eastern philosophy |
The 20th century brought with it upheavals that produced a series of conflicting developments within philosophy over the basis of knowledge and the validity of various absolutes. With classical certainties thought to be overthrown, and new social, economic, scientific, ethical, and logical problems, 20th-century philosophy was set for a series of attempts variously to reform, preserve, alter, abolish, previously conceived limits.
Philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and epistemology furthered seemingly antagonistic tendencies in accounting for consciousness and its objects, as expressed in the profound differences between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, both of which had foundations in place at the beginning of the century. Advances in relativity, quantum, and nuclear physics, cybernetics, genetics, and linguistics, rich literary output, and the emergence of the motion picture as an art form greatly enriched philosophical subject matter. Just as profoundly, historical events such as the World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the near collapse of European parliamentary democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, the Holocaust, the use of atomic weapons on Imperial Japan, continued colonial violence, the foundation of the United Nations, the elaboration of new doctrines of human rights, the Vietnam War, the failure of revolutionary sentiment in 1968, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states, continuing inequities in global development and civil society, the resurgence of "fundamental" religious identity in Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu contexts, and seemingly irrepressible if intermittent genocidal activity called into question many philosophical doctrines on human rationality and created ever sharper demands on moral, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion.
This article takes philosophy not in the more general sense of a system of belief or ideology but as a tradition that generally requires a degree of more or less formalized study (although autodidacts have not been excluded) and a degree of institutional recognition in the form of work incorporated into subsequent formalized teaching in university education. Articles referenced here are expected to substantiate standing by demonstrating either of the above criteria.
List of philosophers
- Henri Bergson (1846-1941)
- Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)
- Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
- Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
- George Edward Moore (1873-1958)
- Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)
- Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
- Martin Buber (1878-1965)
- Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
- Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1995)
- Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
- Moritz Schlick (1882-1936)
- Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)
- Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962)
- Ernst Bloch (1885-1977)
- Georg Lukacs (1885-1971)
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
- Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
- Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970)
- Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
- Michael Polanyi (1891-1976)
- Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
- Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
- Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
- Georges Bataille (1897-1962)
- Leo Strauss (1899-1973)
- Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)
- Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
- Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991)
- C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
- Mortimer Adler (1902-2001)
- Herbert Feigl (1902-1988)
- Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)
- Karl Popper (1902-1994)
- Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)
- Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995)
- Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
- Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
- Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
- Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)
- Nelson Goodman (1906-1989)
- Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003)
- Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968)
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908- )
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
- Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
- W.V. Quine (1908-2000)
- Simone Weil (1909-1943)
- Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997)
- Alfred Ayer (1910-1989)
- Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993)
- J. L. Austin (1911-1960)
- Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
- Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989)
- Alan Turing (1912-1954)
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
- Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005)
- Georg Henrik von Wright (1916-2003)
- Donald Davidson (1917-2003)
- Louis Althusser (1918-1990)
- Paul de Man (1919-1983)
- John Rawls (1921-2002)
- Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997)
- Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996)
- Imre Lakatos (1922-1974)
- Rene Girard (1923 - )
- Walter Pitts (1923-1969)
- Arthur Danto (1924- )
- Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994)
- Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)
- Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995)
- Stanley Cavell (1926- )
- Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
- Hilary Putnam (1926- )
- Jürgen Habermas (1929- )
- Jean Baudrillard (1929- )
- Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
- Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
- Luce Irigaray (1930- )
- Michel Serres (1930- )
- Guy Debord (1931-1994)
- Roger Penrose (1931- )
- Charles Taylor (1931- )
- John Searle (1932- )
- Paul Virilio (1932- )
- Antonio Negri (1933- )
- Oskar Negt (1934- )
- Alain Badiou (1937- )
- Thomas Nagel (1937- )
- Robert Nozick (1938-2002)
- Tzvetan Todorov (1939- )
- John D. Caputo (1940- )
- Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940- )
- Jean-Luc Nancy (1940- )
- Giorgio Agamben (1942- )
- John Zerzan (1943- )
- Slavoj Zizek (1949- )
- Christopher Peacocke (1950- )
- Cornel West (1953- )
- Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah (1954- )
Philosophical schools and tendencies
Quasi-philosophical movements, schools, and tendencies
- Anarchism
- Atheism
- Black Nationalism
- Catholicism
- Communism
- Critical theory
- Fascism
- Feminism
- Fundamentalism
- Futurism
- Genocide
- Human rights
- Imperialism
- Libertarianism
- Maoism
- Modernism
- National Socialism
- Nationalism
- Objectivism
- Pan Africanism
- Political Science
- Post-structuralism
- Postmodernism
- Relativism
- Sociology
- Socialism
- Stalinism
- Trotskyism
- Zionism