1800 – 1900 · 17 philosophers
The Nineteenth Century
History marches on; God is dead.
After Kant, the German idealists refused the limits reason had drawn for itself. Fichte began from the I, Schelling turned to nature, and Hegel made all of history the process by which Spirit comes to know itself. His system was vast enough to suffocate, and it provoked a century of revolt.
The revolt came from every direction. Schopenhauer said the essence of the world is not reason but blind will. Kierkegaard said truth is subjective, a person's choice before God. Marx stood Hegel on his head, making material production rather than Spirit the engine of history. Nietzsche announced the death of God and demanded a revaluation of all values.
Meanwhile Mill in England refined utilitarianism into a liberal ethics, Comte in France sought to replace metaphysics with positive science, Peirce and James in America invented pragmatism, and Frege in Jena quietly wrote the first page of modern logic. Every road of the twentieth century starts here.
Schools of this era
Philosophers of this era
Jeremy Bentham边沁
Founder of utilitarianism: 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number' is the sole standard of law and morals, and natural rights are 'nonsense upon stilts'.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte费希特
The beginning of German idealism: the I posits itself and posits the not-I, the world is the field of freedom's activity, and philosophy is the science of freedom.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel黑格尔
The completer of idealism: reality is Absolute Spirit coming to know itself through contradiction and sublation, history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and philosophy is its own time grasped in thought.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling谢林
The philosopher of Romanticism: nature is slumbering spirit, art is philosophy's summit, and in old age he turned to myth and revelation, asking why there is something rather than nothing.
Arthur Schopenhauer叔本华
The essence of the world is blind Will, life a pendulum between pain and boredom, and release lies in art, compassion and asceticism. He brought Indian thought into the West and made pessimism a system.
Auguste Comte孔德
Founder of positivism and of sociology: human thought passes through theological, metaphysical and positive stages, science replaces theology, and Humanity replaces God.
Ludwig Feuerbach费尔巴哈
'God is the projection of the human essence': the secret of theology is anthropology. He stood Hegel on his head and prepared the ground for Marx.
John Stuart Mill约翰·斯图亚特·密尔
The classic statement of liberalism: coercion of an individual is justified only to prevent harm to others. He refined utilitarianism and cast the first parliamentary vote for women's rights.
Søren Kierkegaard克尔凯郭尔
Father of existentialism: truth is subjectivity, faith is a leap over the absurd, and life has aesthetic, ethical and religious stages, each entered by an irreversible choice.
Karl Marx马克思
The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it. History is driven by modes of production, and capitalism breeds its own gravediggers in its contradictions.
Friedrich Engels恩格斯
Marx's collaborator, financier and literary executor, who extended dialectic to nature and brought the origins of family and state into historical materialism.
Wilhelm Dilthey狄尔泰
Founder of the human sciences: nature is to be explained, spirit to be understood; life can be grasped only from within life, and hermeneutics became philosophy.
Charles Sanders Peirce皮尔士
Founder of pragmatism, pioneer of semiotics and the logic of relations, banished from academia in life and recognised after death as America's most original philosopher.
William James威廉·詹姆斯
Founder of American psychology and of pragmatism: truth is the cash-value of an idea, consciousness is a stream, and the will to believe may decide where evidence cannot.
Friedrich Nietzsche尼采
God is dead and all values must be revalued: will to power, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, philosophy with a hammer, and at the end a collapse in a Turin street with his arms around a horse.
Gottlob Frege弗雷格
Inventor of modern logic: quantifiers, function and argument, sense and reference. He set out to reduce arithmetic to logic; a letter from Russell brought the edifice down, but analytic philosophy begins with him.
Henri Bergson柏格森
Duration, intuition and the élan vital: time is not the space on a clock face but an indivisible flow, which intellect chops up and only intuition can enter. He was the most famous philosopher of the early twentieth century.