1900 – present · 44 philosophers
The Twentieth Century to Today
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Twentieth-century philosophy split into two rivers that barely spoke to each other. In the English-speaking world Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein defined philosophy's task as the clarification of language and logic, the Vienna Circle set out to sweep every unverifiable proposition out the door, and Quine and Kripke later invited metaphysics back in.
On the Continent Husserl called for a return to the things themselves, Heidegger asked after the meaning of Being, and Sartre and Beauvoir made existentialism a generation's way of life. Post-war France turned to structure and discourse: Foucault examined how power produces knowledge, Derrida deconstructed the metaphysics of presence, Deleuze invented new concepts.
Toward the century's end the rivers began to meet. Rawls rebuilt political philosophy, Habermas brought communicative reason into critical theory, Kuhn rewrote the story of science, and Rorty declared that analytic philosophy's mirror had shattered. Today's philosophers inherit the whole watershed.
Schools of this era
Philosophers of this era
Edmund Husserl胡塞尔
Founder of phenomenology: back to the things themselves, suspend belief in the world's existence, and describe how consciousness constitutes its objects. Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty all begin with him.
John Dewey杜威
Completer of pragmatism and father of progressive education: knowledge is an instrument of inquiry, democracy a way of life, and the school a society in miniature. He lectured in China for two years.
Alfred North Whitehead怀特海
From mathematical logic to process metaphysics: reality is not substance but event, the universe an organic creative advance, and even God is in becoming.
Bertrand Russell罗素
A founder of analytic philosophy: co-author of Principia Mathematica, inventor of the theory of descriptions, lifelong campaigner for peace, reason and liberty, Nobel laureate in literature, leader of the anti-nuclear movement in old age.
G. E. Moore摩尔
Common sense against metaphysics: he proved the external world by holding up his hands, showed that 'good' is indefinable, and was the spiritual guide of the Bloomsbury group.
Karl Jaspers雅斯贝尔斯
From psychiatry to the philosophy of existence: in limit situations one meets oneself and the Transcendent, reason and communication are philosophy's faith; he coined the 'Axial Age' and after the war asked about German guilt.
Ludwig Wittgenstein维特根斯坦
He changed philosophy twice: the Tractatus says language pictures the world and whereof one cannot speak one must be silent; the Investigations say meaning is use and philosophy is therapy for the diseases language causes.
Martin Heidegger海德格尔
He raised anew the question of the meaning of Being: the human being is Dasein, thrown into the world, caring, being-toward-death; later he turned to language, technology and the history of Being. His entanglement with Nazism remains contested.
Rudolf Carnap卡尔纳普
Leading figure of the Vienna Circle: meaningful propositions must be verifiable, metaphysics consists of meaningless pseudo-propositions, and philosophy is the logical syntax of the language of science.
Walter Benjamin本雅明
Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the fading aura, the flâneur of the arcades, brushing history against the grain: critic, translator and untimely thinker, who took his own life in flight.
Max Horkheimer霍克海默
Founder of critical theory and organiser of the Frankfurt School: Enlightenment turns into its opposite, reason becomes instrumental, and critical theory keeps hope for emancipation alive.
Herbert Marcuse马尔库塞
One-dimensional man, repressive desublimation, the Great Refusal: joining Freud with Marx, he became the mentor of the student movement of 1968, one of its 'three Ms'.
Hans-Georg Gadamer伽达默尔
Philosophical hermeneutics: understanding is not a method but the human way of being, prejudice is its condition, and truth happens in the fusion of horizons and in dialogue with tradition. He lived to a hundred and two.
Karl Popper波普尔
Falsifiability demarcates science from non-science, knowledge grows by conjecture and refutation, and the open society advances by piecemeal social engineering rather than utopian blueprints.
Theodor W. Adorno阿多诺
Negative dialectics and the critique of the culture industry: the whole is the false, to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and philosophy's task is to speak for the non-identical. He was also Schoenberg's pupil and a composer.
Jean-Paul Sartre萨特
Existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, hell is other people: he made existentialism a generation's way of life, refused the Nobel Prize, and moved from the café to the street.
Hannah Arendt阿伦特
The origins of totalitarianism, the banality of evil, action and natality: she rescued politics from philosophy's contempt and held that human dignity lies in the capacity to begin something new.
Emmanuel Levinas列维纳斯
Ethics is first philosophy: the face of the other person commands me before all knowledge, 'thou shalt not kill', and I bear an infinite, asymmetrical responsibility for the Other.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty梅洛-庞蒂
The phenomenology of the body: we do not have bodies, we are our bodies; perception precedes every judgement as our original hold on the world. He was the most patient and least dogmatic of the phenomenologists.
Simone de Beauvoir波伏娃
'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman': The Second Sex applied existentialism to sex and launched second-wave feminism; she herself was the century's most famous intellectual woman.
W. V. O. Quine蒯因
The two dogmas of empiricism overturned: no analytic–synthetic distinction, no isolated statement facing experience; translation is indeterminate, 'to be is to be the value of a variable', and philosophy is continuous with science.
Claude Lévi-Strauss列维-斯特劳斯
Founder of structural anthropology: kinship, myth and totemism all obey unconscious rules like those of language, the savage mind is as rigorous as the scientific, and the final goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man but to dissolve him.
Albert Camus加缪
The absurd and revolt: the world is silent and we crave meaning, and that is the absurd; the answer is neither suicide nor faith but revolt, freedom and passion. 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.'
Paul Ricoeur利科
The third generation of hermeneutics: the hermeneutics of suspicion and of recovery, metaphor and narrative, oneself as another, memory and forgiveness. The most generous and mediating philosopher of the century.
Donald Davidson戴维森
Reasons are causes, anomalous monism, truth-conditional meaning, radical interpretation and the principle of charity, the myth of conceptual schemes: in a series of papers he wove mind, language and action into one whole.
G. E. M. Anscombe安斯康姆
Intention founded the philosophy of action, 'Modern Moral Philosophy' revived virtue ethics and coined 'consequentialism', and she opposed an honorary degree for Truman because he ordered the atomic bombs dropped.
John Rawls罗尔斯
Justice as fairness: behind a veil of ignorance, rational persons would choose equal liberty and only those inequalities that benefit the least advantaged. A Theory of Justice revived normative political philosophy.
Thomas Kuhn库恩
Paradigms, normal science, scientific revolutions, incommensurability: science is not the accumulation of truth but the succession of world-views. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is among the most cited academic books of the century.
Jean-François Lyotard利奥塔
The postmodern condition: incredulity toward grand narratives, knowledge turned into information commodity, incommensurable language-games between which lie differends no tribunal can settle, and philosophy's task to bear witness to the unpresentable.
Gilles Deleuze德勒兹
Difference and repetition, desiring-machines, the rhizome, becoming, the plane of immanence: philosophy is the creation of concepts, and with Guattari he turned it into a machine against every hierarchy.
Michel Foucault福柯
Histories of madness, prison and sexuality: knowledge is a form of power, power produces as well as represses, the subject is a historical product, and 'man' will be erased like a face drawn in sand.
Hilary Putnam普特南
Functionalism, Twin Earth, brains in a vat, internal realism, the entanglement of fact and value: he devised many of the central arguments of contemporary philosophy of mind and language, then criticised them himself.
Alasdair MacIntyre麦金太尔
After Virtue: modern morality is a heap of fragments torn from their context, emotivism is its truth, and the way out is a return to practices, tradition and the virtues, waiting for a new St Benedict.
Jürgen Habermas哈贝马斯
Communicative reason, the public sphere, discourse ethics, modernity as an unfinished project: leader of the second generation of the Frankfurt School and post-war Germany's most influential public intellectual.
Jacques Derrida德里达
Deconstruction: Western metaphysics rests on the privilege of 'presence', and every text is undone by its own difference, différance and supplement; 'there is nothing outside the text'. The most controversial and most cited philosopher of the later twentieth century.
Richard Rorty罗蒂
Philosophy is not the mirror of nature: no representation, no foundations, only conversation and solidarity. Leaving analytic philosophy behind, he turned pragmatism into an ironic liberalism that annoyed every camp.
Alain Badiou巴迪欧
Mathematics is ontology; event, truth and the subject's fidelity: with set theory he rebuilt a Platonism, insisting on truth and the communist Idea when 'postmodernity' had declared truth finished.
Thomas Nagel内格尔
'What is it like to be a bat?', the view from nowhere, the gulf between subjective and objective: in the clearest prose he guards the questions reductionism cannot cover, consciousness, value and the meaning of life.
Robert Nozick诺齐克
The minimal state, rights as side constraints, entitlement theory, the Wilt Chamberlain argument: one book made him the philosophical voice of libertarianism, and then he turned to everything else.
Saul Kripke克里普克
Possible-worlds semantics, rigid designators, necessary a posteriori truths, 'Kripkenstein' rule-scepticism: a prodigy who published a theorem as a teenager and changed metaphysics in a few lectures given without notes.
Derek Parfit帕菲特
Personal identity is not what matters, psychological continuity is; future people count as much as present ones; moral philosophy is a young science and secular ethics has only begun. He wrote two books in his life.
Peter Singer彼得·辛格
Animal liberation, the drowning child and global poverty, effective altruism: he carried utilitarianism from the lecture hall to the street and the wallet, the most influential and most controversial applied ethicist alive.
Slavoj Žižek齐泽克
Lacan plus Hegel plus Hollywood: ideology is the fantasy we act out knowingly, enjoyment is the core of politics, and with jokes, films and obscenities he brought German idealism back into the public square.
Judith Butler朱迪斯·巴特勒
Gender is performative: there is no identity behind the performance, only norms repeatedly cited. Gender Trouble transformed feminism and queer theory, and she then turned to vulnerability, mourning and non-violence.