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
- Alfred North Whitehead1861–1947
- Bertrand Russell1872–1970
- G. E. Moore1873–1958
- Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger1889–1976
- Rudolf Carnap1891–1970
- Karl Popper1902–1994
- Theodor W. Adorno1903–1969
- 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
- John Rawls1921–2002
- Thomas Kuhn1922–1996
- Michel Foucault1926–1984
- Jürgen Habermas1929–2026
- Jacques Derrida1930–2004
Sources
- Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, vol. 4: Philosophy in the Modern World, Oxford University Press