Contemporary Philosophy
From 19th-century German idealism to existentialism, analytic philosophy, and the thought of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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How unresolved difficulties in Kant's critical philosophy, above all the puzzle of the thing-in-itself, opened the door for the systems of 19th-century German Idealism that tried to complete his project.
A survey of philosophy's most turbulent century, tracing the split between the analytic tradition born from Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein and the continental tradition of phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory, through the linguistic, existentialist, and political turns that shaped contemporary thought.
Hegel's dialectical system, which sought to complete German Idealism by grasping reality as the historical self-development of Spirit.
Marx's transformation of Hegelian dialectics into a materialist theory of history, alienation, and the critique of capitalist economy.
Friedrich Nietzsche's genealogical unmasking of conventional morality and his vision of self-overcoming beyond good and evil.
The distinctly American philosophical tradition that judged the meaning and truth of ideas by their practical consequences for inquiry and action, from Peirce's founding maxim through James's and Dewey's divergent elaborations to its late-twentieth-century revival.
The late twentieth-century critique of grand narratives, stable meaning, and totalizing systems that reshaped continental philosophy and cultural theory from the 1960s onward.