20th century 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.

New studies in 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 and continental philosophy, both of which had foundations in place at the beginning of the century. Advances in relativity, quantum, and nuclear physics, generative sciences like cognitive science, cybernetics, genetics, and generative 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)
 * Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)
 * Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
 * Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945)
 * Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
 * Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950)
 * 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)
 * Otto Weininger (1880-1903)
 * Oswald Spengler (1880-1936)
 * Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
 * 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)
 * Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963)
 * Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
 * Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
 * Georges Bataille (1897-1962
 * David Blitz (Unknown- )
 * Leo Strauss (1899-1973)
 * Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976)
 * Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)
 * Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
 * Alfred Tarski (1901-1983)
 * 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)
 * F. P. Ramsey (1903-1930)
 * Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)
 * Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995)
 * 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)
 * Max Black (1909-1988)
 * 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)
 * Arne Næss (1912- )
 * Alan Turing (1912-1954)
 * Albert Camus (1913-1960)
 * Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005)
 * Roderick Chisholm (1916-1999)
 * Georg Henrik von Wright (1916-2003)
 * Donald Davidson (1917-2003)
 * Louis Althusser (1918-1990)
 * Paul de Man (1919-1983)
 * G.E.M. Anscombe (1919-2001)
 * R.M. Hare (1919-2002)
 * P. F. Strawson (1919-2006)
 * Philippa Foot (1920-)
 * John Rawls (1921-2002)
 * Sidney Morgenbesser (1921-2004)
 * Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997)
 * Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996)
 * Imre Lakatos (1922-1974)
 * Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922- )
 * Rene Girard (1923- )
 * Walter Pitts (1923-1969)
 * Arthur Danto (1924- )
 * Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994)
 * William H. Gass (1924- )
 * Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)
 * Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995)
 * Michael Dummett (1925- )
 * Stanley Cavell (1926- )
 * Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
 * Eugene Gendlin (1926- )
 * Leonardo Polo (1926- )
 * Hilary Putnam (1926- )
 * Bernard Williams (1929-2003)
 * Jürgen Habermas (1929- )
 * Jean Baudrillard (1929- )
 * David Kaplan (1929-)
 * Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
 * Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
 * Luce Irigaray (1930- )
 * Michel Serres (1930- )
 * Guy Debord (1931-1994)
 * Roger Penrose (1931- )
 * Richard Rorty (1931- )
 * Charles Taylor (1931- )
 * John Searle (1932- )
 * Paul Virilio (1932- )
 * Antonio Negri (1933- )
 * Jaegwon Kim (1934- )
 * Oskar Negt (1934- )
 * Jerry Fodor (1935- )
 * Alain Badiou (1937- )
 * Thomas Nagel (1937- )
 * Robert Nozick (1938-2002)
 * Gilbert Harman (1938- )
 * Tzvetan Todorov (1939- )
 * John D. Caputo (1940- )
 * Saul Kripke (1940-)
 * Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940- )
 * Jean-Luc Nancy (1940- )
 * David K. Lewis (1941-2001)
 * Giorgio Agamben (1942- )
 * John McDowell (1942-)
 * Daniel Dennett (1942- )
 * John Zerzan (1943- )
 * Simon Blackburn (1944-)
 * Peter Singer (1946-)
 * Alan Belk (1947- )
 * Hans Köchler (1948- )
 * Slavoj Zizek (1949- )
 * Colin McGinn (1950- )
 * Christopher Peacocke (1950- )
 * Hamid Dabashi (1951-)
 * Christine Korsgaard (1952-)
 * Bernard Stiegler (1952- )
 * Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah (1954- )

Philosophical schools and tendencies

 * Analytic philosophy
 * Deconstruction
 * Existentialism
 * Logical Positivism
 * Nihilism
 * Phenomenology
 * Structuralism
 * Integral Advaita

Quasi-philosophical or politically-philosophical movements, schools, and tendencies

 * Anarchism
 * Atheism
 * Black Nationalism
 * Catholicism
 * Communism
 * Critical theory
 * Fascism
 * Feminism
 * Fundamentalism
 * Futurism
 * Genocide
 * Human rights
 * Imperialism
 * Libertarianism (also see Minarchism)
 * Maoism
 * Modernism
 * National Socialism
 * Nationalism
 * Objectivism
 * Pan Africanism
 * Post-structuralism
 * Postmodernism
 * Relativism
 * Socialism
 * Stalinism
 * Trotskyism
 * Zionism

Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts Heimspeki 20. aldar פילוסופיה של המאה העשרים Filosofia contemporânea Филозофија 20. века 1900-luvun filosofia