Period
Contemporary
c. 1900 – present
Philosophy from 1900 to the present, including the analytic tradition of Russell and Wittgenstein and the phenomenology and existentialism of Heidegger and Beauvoir.
Twentieth-century Western philosophy is often described as divided into two traditions. Analytic philosophy, shaped by Russell and Wittgenstein, focused on logic and language. The “continental” tradition of phenomenology and existentialism, shaped by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Beauvoir, focused on lived experience, freedom and history. The division is a rough one, and both traditions continue today.
- Traditions
- Western
Philosophers
- Jane Addams1860–1935
- Alfred North Whitehead1861–1947
- Maria Montessori1870–1952
- Rosa Luxemburg1871–1919
- Bertrand Russell1872–1970
- G. E. Moore1873–1958
- Edith Landmann-Kalischer1877–1951
- Susan Stebbing1885–1943
- Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger1889–1976
- Edith Stein1891–1942
- Rudolf Carnap1891–1970
- Susanne Langer1895–1985
- Karl Popper1902–1994
- Theodor W. Adorno1903–1969
- Ayn Rand1905–1982
- Jean-Paul Sartre1905–1980
- Hannah Arendt1906–1975
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty1908–1961
- Simone de Beauvoir1908–1986
- W. V. O. Quine1908–2000
- Simone Weil1909–1943
- Albert Camus1913–1960
- Elizabeth Anscombe1919–2001
- Iris Murdoch1919–1999
- Philippa Foot1920–2010
- John Rawls1921–2002
- Paulo Freire1921–1997
- Ruth Barcan Marcus1921–2012
- Thomas Kuhn1922–1996
- Jean-François Lyotard1924–1998
- Gilles Deleuze1925–1995
- Michael Dummett1925–2011
- Michel Foucault1926–1984
- Alasdair MacIntyre1929–2025
- Bernard Williams1929–2003
- Jürgen Habermas1929–2026
- Ignacio Ellacuría1930–1989
- Jacques Derrida1930–2004
- Luce Irigarayborn 1930
- Richard Rorty1931–2007
- Jerry Fodor1935–2017
- Robert Nozick1938–2002
- Jean-Luc Nancy1940–2021
- David Lewis1941–2001
- Giorgio Agambenborn 1942
- Slavoj Žižekborn 1949
Sources
- Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, vol. 4: Philosophy in the Modern World, Oxford University Press