The Twentieth Century to Today · School
Phenomenology
Husserl called for a return to the things themselves, describing how consciousness presents the world; Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty turned it toward Being and the body.
Representative figures · 10
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.