Western philosophy

Pythagoras (born c. 570 BCE), from the island of Samos off the coast of Ionia, later lived in Croton in southern Italy (Magna Graecia). Pythagoreans hold that "all is number", giving formal accounts in contrast to the previous material of the Ionians. The discovery of consonant intervals in music by the group enabled the concept of harmony to be established in philosophy, which suggested that opposites could together give rise to new things.^[4] They also believed in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, or reincarnation.

Parmenides argued that, unlike the other philosophers who believed the arche was transformed into multiple things, the world must be singular, unchanging and eternal, while anything suggesting the contrary was an illusion.^[5] Zeno of Elea formulated his famous paradoxes in order to support Parmenides' views about the illusion of plurality and change (in terms of motion), by demonstrating them to be impossible.^[6] An alternative explanation was presented by Heraclitus, who claimed that everything was in flux all the time, famously pointing out that one could not step into the same river twice.^[7] Empedocles may have been an associate of both Parmenides and the Pythagoreans.^[8] He claimed the arche was in fact composed of multiple sources, giving rise to the model of the four classical elements. These in turn were acted upon by the forces of Love and Strife, creating the mixtures of elements which form the world.^[8] Another view of the arche being acted upon by an external force was presented by his older contemporary Anaxagoras, who claimed that nous, the mind, was responsible for that.^[9] Leucippus and Democritus proposed atomism as an explanation for the fundamental nature of the universe. Jonathan Barnes called atomism "the culmination of early Greek thought".^[10]

In addition to these philosophers, the Sophists comprised teachers of rhetoric who taught students to debate on any side of an issue. While as a group, they held no specific views, in general they promoted subjectivism and relativism. Protagoras, one of the most influential Sophist philosophers, claimed that "man is the measure of all things", suggesting there is no objective truth.^[11] This was also applied to issues of ethics, with Prodicus arguing that laws could not be taken seriously because they changed all the time, while Antiphon made the claim that conventional morality should only be followed when in society.^[12]

Classical period

The Classical period of ancient Greek philosophy centers on Socrates and the two generations of students who followed.

Socrates experienced a life-changing event when his friend,

Socrates's questioning earned him enemies who eventually accused him of impiety and corrupting the youth. For this, he was tried by the Athenian democracy, was found guilty, and was sentenced to death. Although his friends offered to help him escape from prison, Socrates chose to remain in Athens and abide by his principles. His execution consisted of drinking poison hemlock. He died in 399 BCE.

After Socrates' death, Plato founded the Platonic Academy and Platonic philosophy. As Socrates had done, Plato identified virtue with knowledge. This led him to questions of epistemology on what knowledge is and how it is acquired.^[14][15]

Socrates had several other students who also founded schools of philosophy. Two of these were short-lived: the Eretrian school, founded by Phaedo of Elis, and the Megarian school, founded by Euclid of Megara. Two others were long-lasting: Cynicism, founded by Antisthenes, and Cyrenaicism, founded by Aristippus. The Cynics considered life's purpose to live in virtue, in agreement with nature, rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, and fame, leading a simple life free from all possessions. The Cyrenaics promoted a philosophy nearly opposite that of the Cynics, endorsing hedonism, holding that pleasure was the supreme good, especially immediate gratifications; and that people could only know their own experiences, beyond that truth was unknowable.

The final school of philosophy to be established during the Classical period was the

The Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods saw the continuation of Aristotelianism and Cynicism, and the emergence of new philosophies, including Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neopythagoreanism. Platonism also continued but came under new interpretations, particularly Academic skepticism in the Hellenistic period and Neoplatonism in the Imperial period. The traditions of Greek philosophy heavily influenced Roman philosophy. In Imperial times, Epicureanism and Stoicism were particularly popular.^[20]

The various schools of philosophy proposed various and conflicting methods for attaining

Following the end of the skeptical period of the Academy with Antiochus of Ascalon, Platonic thought entered the period of Middle Platonism, which absorbed ideas from the Peripatetic and Stoic schools. More extreme syncretism was done by Numenius of Apamea, who combined it with Neopythagoreanism.^[36] Also affected by the Neopythagoreans, the Neoplatonists, first of them Plotinus, argued that mind exists before matter, and that the universe has a singular cause which must therefore be a single mind.^[37] As such, Neoplatonism become essentially a religion, and had much impact on later Christian thought.^[37]

Medieval

Medieval philosophy roughly extends from the Christianization of the

A prominent figure of this period was Augustine of Hippo, one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity. Augustine adopted Plato's thought and Christianized it. His influence dominated medieval philosophy perhaps up to the end of era and the rediscovery of Aristotle's texts. Augustinianism was the preferred starting point for most philosophers up until the 13th century. Among the issues his philosophy touched upon were the problem of evil, just war and what time is. On the problem of evil, he argued that evil was a necessary product of human free will.^[39] When this raised the issue of the incompatibility of free will and divine foreknowledge, both he and Boethius solved the issue by arguing that God did not see the future, but rather stood outside of time entirely.^[40]

Scholasticism

An influential school of thought was that of

Anselm of Canterbury (called the 'father of scholasticism') argued that the existence of God could be irrefutably proved with the logical conclusion apparent in the ontological argument, according to which God is by definition the greatest thing in conceivable, and since an existing thing is greater than a non-existing one, it must be that God exists or is not the greatest thing conceivable (the latter being by definition impossible).^[43] A refutation of this was offered by Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, who applied the same logic to an imagined island, arguing that somewhere there must exist a perfect island using the same steps of reasoning (therefore leading to an absurd outcome).^[44]

Boethius also worked on the problem of universals, arguing that they did not exist independently as claimed by Plato, but still believed, in line with Aristotle, that they existed in the substance of particular things.^[28] Another important figure for scholasticism, Peter Abelard, extended this to nominalism, which states (in complete opposition to Plato) that universals were in fact just names given to characteristics shared by particulars.^[45]

Thomas Aquinas, an academic philosopher and the father of Thomism, was immensely influential in medieval Christendom. He was influenced by newly discovered Aristotle, and aimed to reconcile his philosophy with Christian theology.^[46] Aiming to develop an understanding of the soul, he was led to consider metaphysical questions of substance, matter, form, and change.^[46] He defined a material substance as the combination of an essence and accidental features, with the essence being a combination of matter and form, similar to the Aristotelian view.^[47] For humans, the soul is the essence.^[47] Also influenced by Plato, he saw the soul as unchangeable and independent of the body.^[47]

Other Western philosophers from the Middle Ages include

Renaissance humanism

The Renaissance ("rebirth") was a period of transition between the Middle Ages and modern thought,^[48] in which the recovery of ancient Greek philosophical texts helped shift philosophical interests away from technical studies in logic, metaphysics, and theology towards eclectic inquiries into morality, philology, and mysticism.^[49][50] The study of the classics and the humane arts generally, such as history and literature, enjoyed a scholarly interest hitherto unknown in Christendom, a tendency referred to as humanism.^[51][52] Displacing the medieval interest in metaphysics and logic, the humanists followed Petrarch in making humanity and its virtues the focus of philosophy.^[53][54]

At the point of passage from Renaissance into early/classical modern philosophy, the dialogue was used as a primary style of writing by Renaissance philosophers, such as Giordano Bruno.^[55]

The dividing line between what is classified as Renaissance versus modern philosophy is disputed.^[56]

Modern

The term "modern philosophy" has multiple usages. For example, Thomas Hobbes is sometimes considered the first modern philosopher because he applied a systematic method to political philosophy.^[57][58] By contrast, René Descartes is often considered the first modern philosopher because he grounded his philosophy in problems of knowledge, rather than problems of metaphysics.^[59]

Modern philosophy and especially Enlightenment philosophy^[60] is distinguished by its increasing independence from traditional authorities such as the Church, academia, and Aristotelianism;^[61][62] a new focus on the foundations of knowledge and metaphysical system-building;^[63][64] and the emergence of modern physics out of natural philosophy.^[65]

Early modern (17th and 18th centuries)

Some central topics of Western philosophy in its early modern (also classical modern)^[66][67] period include the nature of the mind and its relation to the body, the implications of the new natural sciences for traditional theological topics such as free will and God, and the emergence of a secular basis for moral and political philosophy.^[68] These trends first distinctively coalesce in Francis Bacon's call for a new, empirical program for expanding knowledge, and soon found massively influential form in the mechanical physics and rationalist metaphysics of René Descartes.^[69]

Descartes's epistemology was based on a method called Cartesian doubt, whereby only the most certain belief could act as the foundation for further inquiry, with each step to further ideas being as cautious and clear as possible.^[70] This led him to his famous maxim cogito ergo sum ('I think, therefore I exist'), though similar arguments had been made by earlier philosophers.^[71] This became foundational for much of further Western philosophy, as the need to find a route from the private world of consciousness to the externally existing reality was widely accepted until the 20th century.^[71] A major issue for his thought remained in the mind–body problem, however.^[71] One solution to the problem was presented by Baruch Spinoza, who argued that the mind and the body are one substance.^[72] This was based on his view that God and the universe are one and the same, encompassing the totality of existence.^[73] In the other extreme, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, argued instead that the world was composed of numerous individual substances, called monads.^[74] Together, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are considered influential early rationalists.^[75]

In contrast to Descartes, Thomas Hobbes was a materialist who believed that everything was physical, and an empiricist who thought that all knowledge comes from sensation which is triggered by objects existing in the external world, with thought being a kind of computation.^[76] John Locke was another classic empiricist, with his arguments helping it overtake rationalism as the generally preferred approach.^[77] Together with David Hume, they form the core of 'British empiricism'.^[77] George Berkeley agreed with empiricism, but instead of believing in an ultimate reality which created perceptions, argued in favour immaterialism and the world existing as a result of being perceived.^[78] In contrast, the Cambridge Platonists continued to represent rationalism in Britain.^[77]

In terms of political philosophy, arguments often started from arguing over the first principles of human nature through the thought experiment of what the world would look like without society, a scenario referred to as the state of nature. Hobbes believed that this would be a violent and anarchic, calling life under such a state of affairs "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".^[76] To prevent this, he believed that the sovereign of the state should have essentially unlimited power.^[79] In contrast, Locke believed the state of nature be one where individuals enjoyed freedom, but that some of that (excluding those covered by natural rights) had to be given up when forming a society, but not to the degree of absolute rule.^[80] Jean-Jacques Rousseau meanwhile argued that in nature people were living in a peaceful and comfortable state, and that the formation of society led to the rise of inequality.^[81]

The approximate end of the early modern period is most often identified with Immanuel Kant's systematic attempt to limit metaphysics, justify scientific knowledge, and reconcile both of these with morality and freedom.^[82][83][84] Whereas the rationalists had believed that knowledge came from a priori reasoning, the empiricists had argued that it came from a posteriori sensory experience, Kant aimed to reconcile these views by arguing that the mind uses a priori understanding to interpret the a posteriori experiences.^[85] He had been inspired to take this approach by the philosophy of Hume, who argued that the mechanisms of the mind gave people the perception of cause and effect.^[85]

Many other contributors were philosophers, scientists, medical doctors, and politicians. A short list includes Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi, Blaise Pascal, Nicolas Malebranche, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, Christian Wolff, Montesquieu, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Reid, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Adam Smith.

German idealism

German idealism emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s.^[86]

The most notable work of

Philosophers influenced by Hegel include Ludwig Feuerbach, who coined the term "projection" as pertaining to humans' inability to recognize anything in the external world without projecting qualities of ourselves upon those things; Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels; and the British idealists, notably T. H. Green, J. M. E. McTaggart, F. H. Bradley, and R. G. Collingwood.

Few 20th-century philosophers embraced the core tenets of German idealism after the demise of British idealism. However, quite a few have embraced Hegelian dialectic, most notably

Late modern (19th century)

Late modern philosophy is usually considered to begin around the pivotal year of 1781, when Gotthold Ephraim Lessing died and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason appeared.^[87] The 19th century saw the beginnings of what would later grow into the divide between Continental and analytic traditions of philosophy, with the former more interested in general frameworks of metaphysics (more common in the German-speaking world), and the latter focusing on issues of epistemology, ethics, law and politics (more common in the English-speaking world).^[88]

German philosophy exercised broad influence in this century, owing in part to the dominance of the German

Hegel argued that history was the dialectical journey of the Geist (universal mind) towards self-fulfilment and self-realization.^[92] The Geist's self-awareness is absolute knowledge, which itself brings complete freedom. ^[93] His philosophy was based on absolute idealism, with reality itself being mental. ^[93] His legacy was divided between the conservative Right Hegelians and radical Young Hegelians, with the latter including David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach.^[94] Feuerbach argued for a materialist conception of Hegel's thought, inspiring Karl Marx.^[94]

Arthur Schopenhauer was inspired by Kant and Indian philosophy.^[95] Accepting Kant's division of the world into the noumenal (the real) and phenomenal (the apparent) realities, he, nevertheless, disagreed on the accessibility of the former, arguing that it could in fact be accessed.^[96] The experience of will was how this reality was accessible, with the will underlying the whole of nature, with everything else being appearance.^[96] Whereas he believed the frustration of this will was the cause of suffering, Friedrich Nietzsche thought that the will to power was empowering, leading to growth and expansion, and therefore forming the basis of ethics.

Jeremy Bentham established utilitarianism, which was a consequentialist ethic based on 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number', an idea taken from Cesare Beccaria.^[97] He believed that any act could be measured by its value in this regard through the application of felicific calculus.^[98] His associate James Mill's son John Stuart Mill subsequently took up his thought.^[99] However, in contrast to the valuation of pure pleasure in Bentham's work, Mill divided pleasures into higher and lower kinds.^[100]

Logic began a period of its most significant advances since the inception of the discipline, as increasing mathematical precision opened entire fields of inference to formalization in the work of George Boole and Gottlob Frege.^[101] Other philosophers who initiated lines of thought that would continue to shape philosophy into the 20th century include:

• Gottlob Frege and Henry Sidgwick, whose work in logic and ethics, respectively, provided the tools for early analytic philosophy.
• Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, who founded pragmatism.
• Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, who laid the groundwork for existentialism and post-structuralism.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around 1870.^[102] It asserts that the truth of beliefs consists in their usefulness and efficacy rather than their correspondence with reality.^[103] Charles Sanders Peirce and William James were its co-founders and it was later modified by John Dewey as instrumentalism. Since the usefulness of any belief at any time might be contingent on circumstance, Peirce and James conceptualized final truth as something established only by the future, final settlement of all opinion.^[104]

Pragmatism attempted to find a scientific concept of truth that does not depend on personal insight (revelation) or reference to some metaphysical realm. It interpreted the meaning of a statement by the effect its acceptance would have on practice. Inquiry taken far enough is thus the only path to truth.^[105]

For Peirce commitment to inquiry was essential to truth-finding, implied by the idea and hope that inquiry is not fruitless. The interpretation of these principles has been subject to discussion ever since. Peirce's maxim of pragmatism is, "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."^[106]

Critics accused pragmatism falling victim to a simple fallacy: that because something that is true proves useful, that usefulness is an appropriate basis for its truthfulness.

Pragmatism was later worked on by

The three major contemporary approaches to academic philosophy are analytic philosophy, continental philosophy and pragmatism.^[110] They are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive.

The

In the English-speaking world, analytic philosophy became the dominant school for much of the 20th century. The term "analytic philosophy" roughly designates a group of philosophical methods that stress detailed argumentation, attention to semantics, use of classical logic and non-classical logic and clarity of meaning above all other criteria. Though the movement has broadened, it was a cohesive school in the first half of the century. Analytic philosophers were shaped strongly by logical positivism, united by the notion that philosophical problems could and should be solved by attention to logic and language.

Logic

Gottlob Frege's The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) was the first analytic work, according to Michael Dummett (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, 1993). Frege was the first to take 'the linguistic turn,' analyzing philosophical problems through language.^[113] He invented a formal notational system for logic.^[114] His stance was one of anti-psychologism, arguing that logical truths were independent of the human minds discovering them.^[115]

Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore are also often counted as founders of analytic philosophy. They believed that philosophy should be based on analysing propositions.^[116] Russell wrote Principia Mathematica (with Alfred North Whitehead) ^[117] to apply this to mathematics, while Moore did the same for ethics with Principia Ethica. Russell's attempts to find a foundation for mathematics led him to Russell's paradox, which caused Frege to abandon logicism.^[118] Russell espoused logical atomism, declaring that "logic is the essence of philosophy".^[119] In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein put forward a refined version of this view.^[120] Wittgenstein, Russell's 'disciple', argued that the problems of philosophy were simply products of language which were actually meaningless.^[121] This was based on the picture theory of meaning.^[122] Wittgenstein later changed his conception of how language works, arguing instead that it has many different uses, which he called different language games.^[123]

Philosophy of science

The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle started as a study group of Russell and Whitehead.^[124] They argued that the arguments of metaphysics, ethics and theology were meaningless, as they were not logically or empirically verifiable.^[125] This was based on their division of meaningful statements into either the analytic (logical and mathematical statements) and the synthetic (scientific claims).^[125] Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap argued that science rested at its roots on direct observation, but Otto Neurath noted that observation already requires theory in order to have meaning.^[126] Another participant in the Circle was Carnap's self-confessed disciple, Willard Van Orman Quine.^[127] In 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', Quine criticized the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements.^[128] Instead, he advocated for a 'web of belief' approach, whereby all beliefs come from contact with reality (including mathematical ones), but with some being further removed from this contact than others.^[129]

Another former participant in the Circle was Karl Popper. He argued that verificationism was logically incoherent, promoting instead falsificationism as the basis for science.^[130] A further advancement in the philosophy of science was made by Imre Lakatos, who argued that negative findings in individual tests did not falsify theories, but rather entire research programmes would eventually fail explain phenomena.^[131] Thomas Kuhn further argued that science was composed of paradigms, which would eventually shift when evidence accumulated against them.^[132] Based on the idea that different paradigms had different meanings of expressions, Paul Feyerabend went further in arguing for relativism in science.^[133]

Philosophy of language

Wittgenstein had first brought up the idea that ordinary language could solve philosophical problems.^[134] A loosely associated group of philosophers later became known as practitioners of ordinary language philosophy.^[134] It included Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, R. M. Hare, and P. F. Strawson.^[135] They believed that as philosophy was not science, it could only be advanced through careful conceptual clarification and connection instead of observation and experimentation.^[135] However, they had given up the earlier analytic pursuit of using formal logic to express an ideal language, but did nevertheless share the scepticism of metaphysical grand theories.^[135] Unlike Wittgenstein, they believed only some problems of philosophy to be artifacts of language.^[136] This approach has been described as the linguistic turn of analytic philosophy.^[136] Ryle introduced the concept of category mistake, which described the misapplication of a concept in the wrong context (which he accused Descartes of doing with the ghost in the machine).^[137] One of Austin's key insights was that some language perform a perlocutionary function (creating by themselves an effect on the world), thereby being speech acts.^[138] This idea was later taken up by John Searle.^[138]

In the final third of the 20th century, philosophy of language emerged as its own programme.^[139] The theory of meaning became central to this programme.^[140] Donald Davidson argued that meaning could be understood through a theory of truth.^[141] This was based on the work of Alfred Tarski.^[142] Empirically, Davidson would find the meaning of words in different languages by linking them with the objective conditions of their utterance, which established their truthness.^[143] Meaning therefore emerges from the consensus of interpretations of speaker behaviour.^[143] Michael Dummett argued against this view on the basis of its realism.^[144] This was because realism would make the truthness of many sentences beyond measurability.^[145] Instead, he argued for verifiability, based on the idea that one could recognise the proof of truth when offered it.^[146] Alternative to these, Paul Grice put forward a theory that meaning was based on the intention of the speaker, which over time becomes established after repeated use.^[147]

Theories of reference were another major strand of thought on language. Frege had argued that

Early identity theories of mind in the 1950s and '60s were based on the work of Ullin Place, Herbert Feigl, and J. J. C. Smart.^[151] While earlier philosophers such as the Logical Positivists, Quine, Wittgenstein, and Ryle had all used some form of behaviorism to dispense with the mental, they believed that behaviorism was insufficient in explaining many aspects of mental phenomena.^[151] Feigl argued that intentional states could not be thus explained.^[151] Instead, he espoused externalism.^[152] Place meanwhile argued that the mind could be reduced to physical events, while Feigl and Sense agreed they were identical.^[152] Functionalism in contrast argued that the mind was defined by what it does, rather than what it is based on.^[153] To argue against this, John Searle developed the Chinese room thought experiment.^[154] Davidson argued for anomalous monism, which claims that while mental events cause physical ones, and the all causal relations are governed by natural laws, there are however no natural laws governing the causality between mental and physical events.^[143] This anomaly in the name was explained by supervenience.^[144]

In 1970, Keith Campbell proposed a "new epiphenomenalism", according to which the body produces the mind that does not act on the body, a process which he claims is destined to remain mysterious.^[155] Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland argued for eliminative materialism, which claims that understanding the brain will lead to a complete understanding of the mind.^[156] This was based on developments in neuroscience.^[156] However, physicalist theories of mind have had to grapple with the issue of subjective experience raised by Thomas Nagel in What Is It Like to Be a Bat? and Frank Cameron Jackson's so-called knowledge argument.^[157] David Chalmers also argued against physicalism in the philosophical zombie argument.^[158] He further noted that subjective experience posed the hard problem of consciousness.^[158] The inability of physicalist theories to explain conscious feeling has been termed the explanatory gap.^[158] In contrast, Daniel Dennett has claimed that no such gap exists as subjective experiences are a 'philosophical fiction'.^[158]

Ethics

Ethics in 20th century analytic philosophy has been argued to have begun with Moore's Principia Ethica.^[159] Moore argued that what is good cannot be defined.^[160] Instead, he saw ethical behaviour a result of intuition, which led to non-cognitivism.^[161] W. D. Ross in contrast argued that duty formed the basis for ethics.^[159]

Russell's

Another strand of ethical thinking began with G. E. M. Anscombe arguing in 1958 that both consequentialism and deontology were based on obligation, which could not function without divine authority, instead promoting virtue ethics.^[164] Other notable virtue ethicists included Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre.^[165] The latter combined it with communitarianism.^[166]

Other branches

Notable students of Quine include

Analytic philosophy has sometimes been accused of not contributing to the political debate or to traditional questions in aesthetics. However, with the appearance of A Theory of Justice by John Rawls and Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick, analytic political philosophy acquired respectability. Analytic philosophers have also shown depth in their investigations of aesthetics, with Roger Scruton, Nelson Goodman, Arthur Danto and others developing the subject to its current shape.

Continental philosophy

Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe. 20th-century movements such as German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, modern hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation), critical theory, structuralism, post-structuralism and others are included within this loose category. While identifying any non-trivial common factor in all these schools of thought is bound to be controversial, Michael E. Rosen has hypothesized a few common continental themes: that the natural sciences cannot replace the human sciences; that the thinker is affected by the conditions of experience (one's place and time in history); that philosophy is both theoretical and practical; that metaphilosophy or reflection upon the methods and nature of philosophy itself is an important part of philosophy proper.^[168]

The founder of phenomenology,

Existentialism

Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences,^[169][170] shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.^[171] In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.^[172] Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophy, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.^[173][174]

Although they did not use the term, the 19th-century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are widely regarded as the fathers of existentialism. Their influence, however, has extended beyond existentialist thought.^{[175][176][177]}

Marxism and critical theory

In contemporary philosophy, the term "critical theory" describes the Western Marxist philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which was developed in Germany in the 1930s. Critical theory maintains that ideology is the principal obstacle to human emancipation.^[178]

Phenomenology and hermeneutics

Inaugurated by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism sought to clarify systems of signs through analyzing the discourses they both limit and make possible. Saussure conceived of the sign as being delimited by all the other signs in the system, and ideas as being incapable of existence prior to linguistic structure, which articulates thought. This led continental thought away from humanism, and toward what was termed the decentering of man: language is no longer spoken by man to express a true inner self, but language speaks man.

Structuralism sought the province of a hard science, but its positivism soon came under fire by post-structuralism, a wide field of thinkers, some of whom were once themselves structuralists, but later came to criticize it. Structuralists believed they could analyze systems from an external, objective standing, for example, but the poststructuralists argued that this is incorrect, that one cannot transcend structures and thus analysis is itself determined by what it examines. While the distinction between the signifier and signified was treated as crystalline by structuralists, poststructuralists asserted that every attempt to grasp the signified results in more signifiers, so meaning is always in a state of being deferred, making an ultimate interpretation impossible.

Structuralism came to dominate continental philosophy throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, encompassing thinkers as diverse as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan. Post-structuralism came to predominate from the 1970s onwards, including thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and even Roland Barthes; it incorporated a critique of structuralism's limitations.

Process philosophy

Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to continental philosophy than analytic philosophy, because it is usually only taught in continental departments.^[182] However, other sources state that process philosophy should be placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus continental methods in contemporary philosophy.^[183][184]

Influences from Eastern philosophy

The Cyrenaic philosopher Hegesias of Cyrene is thought by some to have been influenced by the teachings of Ashoka's Buddhist missionaries.^[189]

Empiricist philosophers, such as Hume and Berkeley, favoured the bundle theory of personal identity.^[190] In this theory, the mind is simply 'a bundle of perceptions' without unity.^[191] One interpretation of Hume's view of the self, argued for by philosopher and psychologist James Giles, is that Hume is not arguing for a bundle theory, which is a form of reductionism, but rather for an eliminative view of the self. Rather than reducing the self to a bundle of perceptions, Hume rejects the idea of the self altogether. On this interpretation, Hume is proposing a "no-self theory" and thus has much in common with Buddhist thought (see anattā). Psychologist Alison Gopnik has argued that Hume was in a position to learn about Buddhist thought during his time in France in the 1730s.^[192]

See also

• Glossary of philosophy
• History of philosophy
• Index of philosophy
• List of philosophers
• List of philosophical theories
• List of philosophies
• Pseudophilosophy

Other traditions

• African philosophy
• Eastern philosophy
• Christian philosophy
• Islamic philosophy
• Jewish philosophy

National traditions

• American philosophy
• British philosophy
• French philosophy
• German philosophy
• Polish philosophy

Non-mainstream movements

• New realism
• Objectivism
• Personalism
• Post-analytic philosophy
• Post-Continental philosophy

Notes