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Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who found it useful for referring to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy includes the following movements: German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and some other branches of western Marxism.
General characteristics
It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements. The term "continental philosophy", like "analytic philosophy", lacks clear definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views. Some scholars have suggested the term may be more pejorative than descriptive, functioning as a label for types of western philosophy rejected or disliked by analytic philosophers. Nonetheless, some scholars have ventured to identify common themes that typically characterize continental philosophy.
First, continental philosophers generally reject scientism, the view that the natural sciences are the best or most accurate way of understanding all phenomena. Continental philosophers often argue that science depends upon a "pre-theoretical substrate of experience", a form of the Kantian conditions of possible experience, and that scientific methods are inadequate to understand such conditions of intelligibility.
Second, continental philosophy usually considers these conditions of possible experience as variable: determined at least partly by factors such as context, space and time, language, culture, or history. Thus continental philosophy tends toward historicism. Where analytic philosophy tends to treat philosophy in terms of discrete problems, capable of being analyzed apart from their historical origins (much as scientists consider the history of science inessential to scientific inquiry), continental philosophy typically suggests that "philosophical argument cannot be divorced from the textual and contextual conditions of its historical emergence".
Third, continental philosophy typically holds that conscious human agency can change these conditions of possible experience: "if human experience is a contingent creation, then it can be recreated in other ways". Thus continental philosophers tend to take a strong interest in the unity of theory and practice, and tend to see their philosophical inquiries as closely related to personal, moral, or political transformation. This tendency is very clear in the Marxist tradition ("philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it"), but is also central in existentialism and post-structuralism.
A final characteristic trait of continental philosophy is an emphasis on metaphilosophy. In the wake of the development and success of the natural sciences, continental philosophers have often sought to redefine the method and nature of philosophy. In some cases (such as German idealism or phenomenology), this manifests as a renovation of the traditional view that philosophy is the first, foundational, a priori science. In other cases (such as hermeneutics, critical theory, or structuralism), it is held that philosophy investigates a domain that is irreducibly cultural or practical. And in some cases, continental philosophers (such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the later Heidegger, or Derrida) harbor grave doubts about the coherence of any conceptions of philosophy.
Ultimately, the foregoing distinctive traits derive from a broadly Kantian thesis that the nature of knowledge and experience is bound by conditions that are not directly accessible to empirical inquiry.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a nineteenth-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, using a distinctive German language style and displaying a fondness for metaphor and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth raise considerable problems of interpretation, generating an extensive secondary literature in both continental and analytic philosophy.
Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual ever to have held this position), but resigned in 1879 because of health problems, which would plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.
Nietzsche's works remain controversial, and there is widespread disagreement about their interpretation and significance. Part of the difficulty in interpreting Nietzsche arises from the uniquely provocative style of his philosophical writing. Nietzsche called himself a philosopher of the hammer, and he frequently delivered trenchant critiques of Christianity and of great philosophers like Plato and Kant in the most offensive and blasphemous terms possible given the context of 19th century Europe. His arguments often employed ad-hominem attacks and emotional appeals, and, particularly in his aphoristic works, he often jumps from one grand assertion to another (leaping from mountain-top to mountain-top, as he describes it), with little sustained logical support or elucidation of the connection between his ideas. All these aspects of Nietzsche's style run counter to traditional values in philosophical writing, and they alienated Nietzsche from the academic establishment both in his time and, to a lesser extent, today (when some analytic philosophers tend to dismiss Nietzsche as inconsistent and speculative, producing something other than "real" philosophy).
A few of the themes that Nietzsche scholars have devoted the most attention to include Nietzsche's views on morality, his view that "God is dead" (and along with it any sort of God's-eye view on the world thus leading to perspectivism), his notions of the will to power and Übermensch, and his suggestion of eternal return.
Morality
In Daybreak Nietzsche begins his "Campaign against Morality". He calls himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticizes the prominent moral schemes of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and Utilitarianism. However, Nietzsche did not want to destroy morality, but rather to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian world. He indicates his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital impulses of life itself.
In both these projects, Nietzsche's genealogical account of the development of master-slave morality occupies a central place. Nietzsche presents master-morality as the original system of morality-perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. Here, value arises as a contrast between good and bad: wealth, strength, health, and power (the sort of traits found in an Homeric hero) count as good; while bad is associated with the poor, weak, sick, and pathetic (the sort of traits conventionally associated with slaves in ancient times).
Slave-morality, in contrast, can only come about as a reaction to master-morality. Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Here, value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good associated with charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and subservience; evil seen in the cruel, selfish, wealthy, indulgent, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave-morality as an ingenious ploy among the slaves and the weak (such as the Jews and Christians dominated by Rome) to overturn the values of their masters and to gain power for themselves: justifying their situation, and at the same time fixing the broader society into a slave-like life.
Nietzsche sees the slave-morality as a social illness that has overtaken Europe - a derivative and resentful value which can only work by condemning others as evil. In Nietzsche's eyes, Christianity exists in a hypocritical state wherein people preach love and kindness but find their joy in condemning and punishing others for pursuing that which morality does not allow them to act upon publicly. Nietzsche calls for the strong in the world to break their self-imposed chains and assert their own power, health, and vitality upon the world.
The death of God, nihilism, and perspectivism
The statement "God is dead," occurring in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in The Gay Science), has become one of his best-known remarks. On the basis of this remark, most commentators regard Nietzsche as an atheist. In Nietzsche's view, recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively 'killed' the Christian God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years.
Nietzsche claimed the 'death' of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on things, and along with it any coherent sense of objective truth. Instead we would retain only our own multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives. This view has acquired the name "perspectivism".
Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself." Developing this idea, Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, therein introducing the concept of a value-creating Übermensch. According to Lampert, "the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism Zarathustra's gift of the superman is given to a mankind not aware of the problem to which the superman is the solution."
The Will to Power
An important element of Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the "will to power," which provides a basis for understanding motivation in human behavior. But this concept may have wider application, as Nietzsche, in a number of places, also suggests that the will to power is a more important element than pressure for adaptation or survival. In its later forms Nietzsche's concept of the will to power applies to all living things, suggesting that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, less important than the desire to expand one's power. Nietzsche eventually took this concept further still, and transformed the idea of matter as centers of force into matter as centers of will to power. Nietzsche wanted to dispense with the theory of matter, which he viewed as a relic of the metaphysics of substance. One study of Nietzsche defines his fully-developed concept of the will to power as "the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation" revealing the will to power as "the principle of the synthesis of forces."
Nietzsche's notion of the will to power can also be viewed as a response to Schopenhauer's "will to live." Writing a generation before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had regarded the entire universe and everything in it as driven by a primordial will to live, thus resulting in all creatures' desire to avoid death and to procreate. Nietzsche, however, challenges Schopenhauer's account and suggests that people and animals really want power; living in itself appears only as a subsidiary aim - something necessary to promote one's power. In defense of his view, Nietzsche appeals to many instances in which people and animals willingly risk their lives in order to promote their power, most notably in instances like competitive fighting and warfare. Once again, Nietzsche seems to take part of his inspiration from the ancient Homeric Greek texts he knew well: Greek heroes and aristocrats or "masters" did not desire mere living (they often died quite young and risked their lives in battle) but wanted power, glory, and greatness. In this regard he often mentions the common Greek theme of agon or contest.
Übermensch
Another concept important to an understanding of Nietzsche's thought is the Übermensch (variously translated - often without regard to the gender-neutrality of the German word Mensch, which means "person" - as superman, superhuman, or overman). Nietzsche contrasts the Übermensch with the Last Man, who appears as an exaggerated version of the degraded "goal" that unified the liberal democratic, bourgeois, socialist, and communist social and political programs. The plural Übermenschen never appears in Nietzsche's writings, which sharply contrasts with Nazi interpretations of his corpus. Michael Tanner suggests Übermensch means the man who lives above and beyond pleasure and suffering, treating both circumstances equally "because joy and suffering are ... inseparable.
The principle of Eternal Return
Another of Nietzsche's ideas has become frequently cited, his notion of "eternal recurrence" or eternal return. Scholars disagree about the proper interpretation of this idea. In one view, Nietzsche proposes a thought-experiment to determine who actually leads their life in a strong and vital way: we need to imagine that this life which we lead does not simply end at our deaths, but will repeat over and over again for all eternity, each moment recurring in exactly the same way, without end. Those who recoil from this idea with horror have not yet learned to love and value life in the way that Nietzsche would admire; those who would embrace the idea cheerfully, ipso facto, lead the right sort of life.
Arthur Schopenhauer
(February 22, 1788 - September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher known for his atheistic pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the fundamental question of whether reason alone can unlock answers about the world. Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, emphasized the role of man's basic motivation, which Schopenhauer called "will". Schopenhauer's analysis of "will" led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled. Consequently, Schopenhauer favored a lifestyle of negating human desires, similar to the teachings of Buddhism.
Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of "will", his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known philosophers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud.
Development of the work
The development of Schopenhauer's ideas took place very early in his career (1814-1818) and culminated in the publication of the first volume of Will and Representation in 1819. This first volume consisted of four books - covering his epistemology, ontology, aesthetics and ethics, in order. Much later in his life, in 1844, Schopenhauer published a second edition in two volumes, the first a virtual reprint of the original, and the second a new work consisting of clarifications to and additional reflections on the first. His views had not changed substantially.
The belated fame which came to him after 1851 stimulated a renewed interest in his seminal work and lead to a third and final edition published in 1859, just one year before his death (and adding 136 more pages.) In the preface to the latter Schopenhauer noted: "If I also have at last arrived, and have the satisfaction at the end of my life of seeing the beginning of my influence, it is with the hope that, according to an old rule, it will last longer in proportion to the lateness of its beginning."[2]
Will
Schopenhauer used the word "will" as a human's most familiar designation for the concept that can also be signified by other words such as "desire", "striving", "wanting", "effort" and "urging".
Representation
He used the word representation (Vorstellung) to signify the mental idea or image of any object that is experienced as being external to the mind. It is sometimes translated as idea or presentation. This concept includes the representation of the observing subject's own body. Schopenhauer called the subject's own body the immediate object because it is in the closest proximity to the mind, which is located in the brain.
Philosophy of the "will"
A key focus of Schopenhauer was his investigation of individual motivation. Before Schopenhauer, Hegel had popularized the concept of Zeitgeist, the idea that society consisted of a collective consciousness which moved in a distinct direction, directing the actions of its members. Schopenhauer, a reader of both Kant and Hegel, criticized their logical optimism and the belief that individual morality could be determined by society and reason. Schopenhauer believed that humans were motivated only by their own basic desires, or Wille zum Leben ("will": (literally, "will-to-life")), which directed all of mankind. For Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human action in the world.
Art and aesthetics
For Schopenhauer, human desire and will cause suffering or pain. A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesethetic contemplation. This is the next best way, short of not willing at all, which is the best way. Music was also given a special status in Schopenhauer's aesthetics as it did not rely upon the medium of phenomenal representation. Music presents the will itself, not the way that the will appears to an individual observer. "Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually embodied the will itself."
Schopenhauer and Buddhism
Many Europeans, in the 1830s and 1840s, including Schopenhauer himself, found a correspondence between Schopenhauerian thought and the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Similarities centered on the principles that life involves suffering, that suffering is caused by desire, and that the extinction of desire leads to salvation. Thus three of the four "truths of the Buddha" correspond to Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will.
For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is understood to be prior to thought. Schopenhauer felt this was similar to notions of purushartha or goals of life in Vedanta Hinduism.
In Schopenhauer's philosophy, denial of the will is attained by either:
• Personal experience of an extremely great suffering that leads to loss of the will to live; or
• Knowledge of the essential nature of life in the world through observation of the suffering of other people.
Marxism
is the political philosophy and practice derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Any political practice or theory that is based on an interpretation of the works of Marx and Engels may be called Marxism. A theoretical presence of Marxist approaches in western academic fields of research is present in the disciplines of anthropology, media studies, theatre, history, Sociological theory, economics, literary criticism, aesthetics and philosophy.
Early influences
Classical Marxism was influenced by a number of different thinkers. These thinkers can be divided roughly into 3 groups:
• German Philosophers including: Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach
• British Political Economists including: Adam Smith & David Ricardo
• French Social Theorists including: Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Charles Fourier; Henri de Saint-Simon; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; Flora Tristan; Louis Blanc

Main ideas
The main ideas to come out of Marx and Engels' collective works include:
• Exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of paying workers less than the full value of their labour, in order to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit. This profit is not however moderated in terms of risk vs. return.
• Alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" ("Gattungswesen", usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). He believes that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour. Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated.
• Base and superstructure: Marx and Engels use the "base-structure" metaphor to explain the idea that the totality of relations among people with regard to "the social production of their existence" forms the economic basis, on which arises a superstructure of political and legal institutions. To the base corresponds the social consciousness which includes religious, philosophical, and other main ideas. The base conditions both, the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production causes social revolutions, and the resulting change in the economic basis will sooner or later lead to the transformation of the superstructure. For Marx, though, this relationship is not a one way process - it is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure in the first instance and remains the foundation of a form of social organization which then can act again upon both parts of the base-structure metaphor. The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one, not a distinction between actual entities "in the world".
• Class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the awareness, both of itself and of the social world around it, that a social class possess, and its capacity to act in its own rational interests based on this awareness. Thus class consciousness must be attained before the class may mount a successful revolution. Other methods of revolutionary action have been developed however, such as vanguardism.
• Ideology: Without offering a general definition for ideology, Marx on several instances has used the term to designate the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, "ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces". Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, as well as its ruling ideas, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. As Marx said famously in The German Ideology, "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force".[ Therefore the ideology of a society is of enormous importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor as capital ~ a degradation of human life).
• Historical materialism: Historical materialism was first articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).
• Political economy: The term "political economy" originally meant the study of the conditions under which production was organized in the nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy, then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit that is the result of that activity. Political economy studies the means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests itself in economic activity.
Marx's theory of history
The Marxist theory of historical materialism understands society as fundamentally determined by the material conditions at any given time - this means the relationships which people enter into with one another in order to fulfill their basic needs, for instance to feed and clothe themselves and their families. In general Marx and Engels identified five (and one transitional) successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe.
1. Primitive Communism: as seen in cooperative tribal societies.
2. Slave Society: which develops when the tribe becomes a city-state. Aristocracy is born.
3. Feudalism: aristocracy is the ruling class. Merchants develop into capitalists.
4. Capitalism: capitalists are the ruling class, who create and employ the true working class.
5. Socialism ("Dictatorship of the proletariat"): workers gain class consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state.
6. Communism: a classless and stateless society.
Marxism-Leninism
Note: this is a discussion of Marxism-Leninism as a school of thought. At least in terms of adherents and impact on the world stage, Marxism-Leninism, also known colloquially as Bolshevism or simply communism is the biggest trend within Marxism, easily dwarfing all of the other schools of thought combined. Marxism-Leninism is a term originally coined by the CPSU in order to denote the ideology that Vladimir Lenin had built upon the thought of Karl Marx. There are two broad areas that has set apart Marxism-Leninism as a school of thought.
First, Lenin's followers generally view his additions to the body of Marxism as the practical corollary to Marx's original theoretical contributions of the 19th century; insofar as they apply under the conditions of advanced capitalism that they found themselves working in. Lenin called this time-frame the era of Imperialism. For example, Joseph Stalin wrote that "Leninism grew up and took shape under the conditions of imperialism, when the contradictions of capitalism had reached an extreme point, when the proletarian revolution had become an immediate practical question." [14] The most important consequence of a Leninist-style theory of Imperialism is the strategic need for workers in the industrialized countries to bloc or ally with the oppressed nations contained within their respective countries' colonies abroad in order to overthrow capitalism. This is the source of the slogan "Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World, Unite", which is a twist on the traditional socialist slogan.
Second, the other distinguishing characteristic of Marxism-Leninism is how it approaches the question of organization. Lenin believed that the traditional model of the Social Democratic parties of the time, which was a loose, multi-tendency organization was inadequate for overthrowing the Tsarist regime in Russia. He proposed a hardened cadre organization that disciplined itself under the model of Democratic Centralism.
Marxism-Leninism was closely associated with the figure of Joseph Stalin until his death. Upon the death of Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of the Soviet Union, an act which ultimately lead to the splintering of the Marxist-Leninism into several competing schools of thought.
Western Marxism is a term used to describe a wide variety of Marxist theoreticians based in Western and Central Europe (and more recently North America), in contrast with philosophy in the Soviet Union, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or the People's Republic of China.
Structural Marxism
Structural Marxism is an approach to Marxism based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French theorist Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the late 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and sociologists outside of France during the 1970s.
Neo-Marxism
Neo-Marxism is a school of Marxism that began in the 20th century and hearkened back to the early writings of Marx, before the influence of Engels, which focused on dialectical idealism rather than dialectical materialism. It thus rejected economic determinism being instead far more libertarian. Neo-Marxism adds Max Weber's broader understanding of social inequality, such as status and power, to orthodox Marxist thought.
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory, social research, and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or influenced by them: it is not the title of any institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to describe themselves.
The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's alleged followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist or Social-Democratic parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically, technologically, and culturally advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions.
Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist synthesis in the 1954 work Eros and Civilization). Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and contradiction as inherent properties of reality.
Positivism
is the philosophy that the only authentic knowledge is knowledge that is based on actual sense experience. Such knowledge can only come from affirmation of theories through strict scientific method. Metaphysical speculation is avoided. Though the positivist approach can be traced back to the beginnings of scientific method in Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics, the concept was first coined by Auguste Comte, widely considered the first modern sociologist, in the middle of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, logical positivism-a stricter and more formal version of Comte's basic thesis-sprang up in Vienna and grew to become one of the dominant movements in American and British philosophy. The positivist view is sometimes referred to as a scientistic ideology, and is often shared by technocrats who believe in the necessity of progress through scientific progress, and by naturalists, who argue that any method for gaining knowledge should be limited to natural, physical, and material approaches. In psychology, a positivistic approach is favoured by behaviourism.
Logical positivism
Logical positivism (later and more accurately called logical empiricism) is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism, the idea that our knowledge includes a component that is not derived from observation.
Logical Positivism grew from the discussions of a group called the "First Vienna Circle" which gathered at the Café Central before World War I. After the war Hans Hahn, a member of that early group, helped bring Moritz Schlick to Vienna. Schlick's Vienna Circle, along with Hans Reichenbach's Berlin Circle, propagated the new doctrines more widely in the 1920s and early 1930s. It was Otto Neurath's advocacy that made the movement self-conscious and more widely known. A 1929 pamphlet written by Neurath, Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap summarized the doctrines of the Vienna Circle at that time. These included: the opposition to all metaphysics, especially ontology and synthetic a priori propositions; the rejection of metaphysics not as wrong but as having no meaning; a criterion of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work; the idea that all knowledge should be codifiable in a single standard language of science; and above all the project of "rational reconstruction", in which ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language. In the early 1930s, the Vienna Circle dispersed, mainly because of political upheaval and the untimely deaths of Hahn and Schlick. The most prominent proponents of logical positivism emigrated to United Kingdom and United States, where they considerably influenced American philosophy. Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science. During this period of upheaval, Carnap proposed a replacement for the earlier doctrines in his "Logical Syntax of Language". This change of direction and the somewhat differing views of Reichenbach and others led to a consensus that the English name for the shared doctrinal platform, in its American exile from the late 1930s, should be "logical empiricism".
Karl Popper's objection
Karl Popper was a well-known critic of logical positivism, who published the book Logik der Forschung in 1934 (translated by himself as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, published 1959). In it he argued that the positivists' criterion of verifiability was too strong a criterion for science, and should be replaced by a criterion of falsifiability. Popper thought that falsifiability was a better criterion because it did not invite the philosophical problems inherent in verifying an induction, and it allowed statements from the physical sciences which seemed scientific but which did not meet the verification criterion.
Popper's concern was not with distinguishing meaningful from meaningless statements, but distinguishing scientific from metaphysical statements. Unlike the positivists, he did not hold that metaphysical statements must be meaningless; neither did he hold that a statement that in one century was "metaphysical" and unfalsifiable (like the ancient Greek philosophy about atoms), could not in another century become falsifiable and thus scientific. He was, in general, more concerned with scientific practice than with the logical issues that troubled the positivists.
Popper thought his philosophy of science could itself be deemed as verifiable[15]. He denied that science need rely on inductive reasoning, although most philosophers think it obvious that science does rely on it.
In philosophy and models of scientific inquiry, postpositivism (also called postempiricism) is a metatheoretical stance following positivism. One of the main supporters of postpositivism was Sir Karl Popper. Others mentioned in connection with postpositivism are John Dewey and Nicholas Rescher. It is a stance that recognizes most of the criticisms that have been raised against traditional logical positivism and similar foundational epistemologies, but also a stance that is critical about what is seen as misconceptions about positivism itself.
Ammendments to positivism
Postpositivists believe that human knowledge is not based on unchallengeable, rock-solid foundations; rather it is conjectural. But they think we do have real grounds, or warrants, for asserting these beliefs or conjectures, although these warrants can be modified or withdrawn in the light of further investigation.
The postpositivist paradigm emerged as a response to the fall in popularity of positivism at the end of World War II. The main tenets of postpositivism (and where it differs from positivism) are that the knower and known cannot be separated, and the absence of a shared, single reality. Therefore, postpositivism attempts to reconcile the main criticisms made of positivism.
The development and advocacy of alternative paradigms, such as postpositivism, pragmatism and constructivism marked a period of great development in relativist theory. These paradigms have had significant influence in the social sciences over the past half century, broadening the spectrum of social inquiry.
Neo-Scholasticism
is the revival and development from the second half of the nineteenth century of medieval scholastic philosophy. It has some times been called neo-Thomism partly because Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century gave to scholasticism a final form, partly because the idea gained ground that only Thomism could infuse vitality into twentieth century scholasticism.
Traditional elements
Neo-Scholasticism seeks to restore the fundamental doctrines embodied in the scholasticism of the thirteenth century. The essential conceptions may be summarized as follows:
(1) God, pure actuality and absolute perfection, is substantially distinct from every finite thing: He alone can create and preserve all beings other than Himself. His infinite knowledge includes all that has been, is, or shall be, and likewise all that is possible.
(2) As to our knowledge of the material world: whatever exists is itself, an incommunicable, individual substance. To the core of self-sustaining reality, in the oak-tree for instance, other realities (accidents) are added -- size, form, roughness, and so on. All oak-trees are alike, indeed are identical in respect of certain constituent elements. Considering this likeness and even identity, our human intelligence groups them into one species and again, in view of their common characteristics, it ranges various species under one genus. Such is the Aristotelean solution of the problem of universals. Each substance is in its nature fixed and determined; and nothing is farther from the spirit of Scholasticism than a theory of evolution.
But this statism requires as its complement a moderate dynamism, and this is supplied by the central concepts of act and potency. Whatsoever changes is, just for that reason, limited. The oak-tree passes through a process of growth, of becoming: whatever is actually in it now was potentially in it from the beginning. Its vital functions go on unceasingly (accidental change); but the tree itself will die, and out of its decayed trunk other substances will come forth (substantial change). The theory of matter and form is simply an interpretation of the substantial changes which bodies undergo. The union of matter and form constitutes the essence of concrete being, and this essence is endowed with existence. Throughout all change and becoming there runs a rhythm of finality; the activities of the countless substances of the universe converge towards an end which is known to God; finality involves optimism.
(3) Man, a compound of body (matter) and of soul (form), puts forth activities of a higher order -- knowledge and volition. Through his senses he perceives concrete objects, e.g. this oak; through his intellect he knows the abstract and universal (the oak). All our intellectual activity rests on sensory function; but through the active intellect (intellectus agens) an abstract representation of the sensible object is provided for the intellectus possibilis. Hence the characteristic of the idea, its non-materiality, and on this is based the principal argument for the spirituality and immortality of the soul. Here, too, is the foundation of logic and of the theory of knowledge, the justification of our judgments and syllogisms.
Upon knowledge follows the appetitive process, sensory or intellectual according to the sort of knowledge. The will (appetitus intellectualis) in certain conditions is free, and thanks to this liberty man is the master of his destiny. Like all other beings, we have an end to attain and we are morally obliged, though not compelled, to attain it.
Natural happiness would result from the full development of our powers of knowing and loving. We should find and possess God in this world since the corporeal world is the proper object of our intelligence. But above nature is the order of grace and our supernatural happiness will consist in the direct intuition of God, the beatific vision. Here philosophy ends and theology begins.
Adaptation to modern needs
The neo-Scholastic programme includes, in the next place, the adaptation of medieval principles and doctrines to modern intellectual needs. Dr. Ehrhard said: "Aquinas should be our beacon, not our boundary". The new Scholasticism in part differs from the old, and in part adapts itself to our age.
Neo-Scholasticism rejects some medieval theories of physics, celestial and terrestrial, e.g. the perfection and superiority of astral substance, the "incorruptibility" of the heavenly bodies, their external connexion with "motor spirits", the influence of the stars on the generation of earthly beings, the four "simple" bodies, etc. It further rejects those philosophical theories which are disproved by the results of investigation; e.g. the diffusion of sensible "species" throughout a medium and their introduction into the organs of sense. It follows the example of the Aristotelean and medieval philosophy in taking the data of research as the groundwork of its speculation. It is not possible to explain the world of phenomena while neglecting the phenomena that make up the world.
The medieval scholars cultivated the history of philosophy solely with a view to its utility, i.e. as a means of gathering the deposit of truth contained in the writings of the ancients and, especially, for the purpose of refuting error. Neo-Scholasticism employs critical methods; it does not attempt to condense the opinions of others into a syllogism and refute them with a phrase. Its chief concern is with present-day systems. It takes issue with them and offsets their theories of the world by a synthesis of its own. Neo-Scholasticism found itself face to face the systems in vogue, especially of Positivism and Criticism. And it had to take up, from its own point of view, the significance of such concepts as being, substance, absolute, cause, potency, and act. It further needed to show that God is not unknowable; to rebut the charges gainst the traditional proofs of God's existence; to deal with the materials furnished by ethnography and the history of religions; and to study the various forms which monism and immanentism assume.
Existentialism
is a term which has been applied to the work of a disparate group of late nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject - not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophy, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.
Existentialism emerged as a movement in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, foreshadowed most notably by nineteenth-century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, though it had forerunners in earlier centuries. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka also described existential themes in their literary works.
It took explicit form as a philosophical current in Continental philosophy, first in the work of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in the 1930s in Germany, and then in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s and 1950s in France. Their work focused on such themes as "dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, and nothingness" as fundamental to human existence. Walter Kaufmann described existentialism as "The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life".
Although there are some common tendencies amongst "existentialist" thinkers, there are major differences and disagreements among them (most notably the divide between atheistic existentialists like Sartre and theistic existentialists like Tillich); not all of them accept the validity of the term.[9]
Existence precedes essence
A central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the actual life of the individual is what constitutes what could be called his or her "essence" instead of there being a predetermined essence that defines what it is to be a human. In other words, you could say that the claim that is being made is that the "essence" of human beings is to be who, not what they are. Although it was Sartre who explicitly coined the term, similar notions can be found in the thought of many existentialist philosophers, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger.
It is often claimed in this context that man defines himself, which is often perceived as stating that man can "wish" to be something - anything, a bird, for instance - and then be it. According to Sartre's own account, however, this would rather be a kind of bad faith. What is meant by the statement is that man is (1) defined only insofar as he acts and (2) that he is responsible for his actions. To clarify, it can be said that a man who acts cruelly towards other people is, by that act, defined as a cruel man and in that same instance, he (as opposed to his genes, or "the cruel nature of man," for instance) is defined as being responsible for being this cruel man. As Sartre puts it in his Existentialism is a Humanism: "man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards." Of course, the more positive therapeutic aspect of this is also implied: You can choose to act in a different way, and to be a good person instead of a cruel person. Here it is also clear that since man can choose to be either cruel or good, he is, in fact, neither of these things essentially.[
A focus on concrete existence
As seen in this first central proposition, existentialist thinkers focus on the question of concrete human existence and the conditions of this existence rather than determining a human essence. However, even though the concrete individual existence must be the primary source of information in existentialism, certain conditions are commonly held to be "endemic" to human existence. These conditions are usually in some way related to the inherent meaninglessness or absurdity of the earth and its apparent contrast with our pre-reflexive lived lives which normally present themselves to us as meaningful. When our meaningful representations of the world break down (which they may do at any time, and for any reason - from a tragedy to a particularly insightful moment on the side of the individual), and we are put face to face with the naked meaninglessness of the world, the results can be devastating. It is in relation to this that Albert Camus famously claimed that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Although "prescriptions" vary, from Kierkegaard's religious "stage" to Camus' insistence on persevering in spite of absurdity, the concern with helping people avoid living their lives in ways that put them in the perpetual danger of having everything meaningful break down is common to most existentialist philosophers.
Bad faith
Bad faith is seen as any denial of free will by lying to oneself about one's self and freedom. This can take many forms, from convincing oneself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of "mimicry" where one acts as "one should." How "one" should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as oneself (say, a bank manager) acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm. This does not mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is bad faith: The main point is the attitude one takes to one's own freedom, and the extent to which one acts in accordance with this freedom. A sign of bad faith can be something like the denial of responsibility for something one has done on the grounds that one just did "as one does" or that one's genes determined one to do as one did. Lying to oneself might appear impossible or contradictory. Sartre denies the subconscious the power to do this, and he claims that the person who is lying to himself has to be aware that he is lying - that he isn't determined, or this "thing" he makes himself out to be. Consider how far someone is (or you are) aware of lying in the cases of self-deception where someone adheres to comfortable but false beliefs and acting where both audience and actors collude in a make-believe world.
Freedom
The existentialist concept of freedom is often misunderstood as a sort of liberum arbitrium where almost anything is possible and where values are inconsequential to choice and action. This interpretation of the concept is often related to the insistence on the absurdity of the world and that there are no relevant or absolutely "good" or "bad" values. However, that there are no values to be found in the world in-itself doesn't mean that there are no values: each of us usually already has his or her values before a consideration of their validity is carried through, and it is, after all, upon these values we act. In Kierkegaard's Judge Vilhelm's account in Either/Or, making "choices" without allowing one's values to confer differing values to the alternatives, is, in fact, choosing not to make a choice - to "flip a coin," as it were, and to leave everything to chance. This is considered to be a refusal to live in the consequence of one's freedom, meaning it quickly becomes a sort of bad faith. As such, existentialist freedom isn't situated in some kind of abstract space where everything is possible: since people are free, and since they already exist in the world, it is implied that their freedom is only in this world, and that it, too, is restricted by it.
What isn't implied in this account of existential freedom, however, is that one's values are immutable; a consideration of one's values may cause one to reconsider and change them (though this rarely happens). A consequence of this fact is that one is not only responsible for one's actions, but also for the values one holds. This entails that a reference to "common values" doesn't "excuse" the individual's actions, because, even though these are the values of the society the individual is part of, they are also his or her own in the sense that s/he could choose them to be different at any time. Thus, the focus on freedom in existentialism is related to the limits of the responsibility one bears as a result of one's freedom: the relationship between freedom and responsibility is one of interdependency, and a clarification of freedom also clarifies what one is responsible for.
The Absurd
The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world beyond what meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or "unfairness" of the world. This contrasts with "karmic" ways of thinking in which "bad things don't happen to good people"; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing as a good person or a bad thing; what happens happens, and it may just as well happen to a good person as to a bad person. This contrasts our daily experience where most things appear to us as meaningful, and where good people do indeed, on occasion, receive some sort of "reward" for their goodness. Most existentialist thinkers, however, will maintain that this is not a necessary feature of the world, and that it definitely isn't a property of the world in-itself. Because of the world's absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd. The notion of the absurd has been prominent in literature throughout history. Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky and many of the literary works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus contain descriptions of people who encounter the absurdity of the world. Albert Camus studied the issue of "the absurd" in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
Atheistic
Atheistic existentialism is the form of existentialism most commonly encountered in today's society. What sets it apart from theistic existentialism is that it rejects the notion of a god and his transcendent will that should in some way dictate how we should live. It rejects the notion that there is any "created" meaning to life and the world, and that a leap of faith is required of man in order for him to live an authentic life. In this kind of existentialism, belief in a god is often considered a form of Bad Faith.
In this kind of existentialism, the way to face the absurdity of the world is to create a meaning for yourself. This creation of meaning ex nihilo doesn't degrade your meaning as such, as all meaning would be created meaning. In other words, creating a meaning to your own life is completely legitimate, as long as you do not base it in "objective" existence, or let it be the main "pillar" of your life. According to Kierkegaard, one would be in a perpetual state of despair (although it would be an unrealised despair that one would flee from whenever it showed itself) if one had some meaning (It doesn't necessarily have to be one single meaning; even a multitude of meanings is fragile) as the main pillar of one's life.
Theistic
Theistic existentialism is, for the most part, Christian in its outlook, but there have been existentialists of other theological persuasions, like Islam (see Transcendent theosophy) and Judaism. The main thing that sets them apart from atheistic existentialists is that they posit the existence of God, and that He is the source of our being. It is generally held that God has designed the world in such a way that we must define our own lives, and each individual is held accountable for his or her own self-definition.
In addition to this, it is commonly held that the only way to truly face the cruelties of the naked facts of existence is to have faith. This faith is by definition irrational, which means that you cannot be persuaded into faith; belief as the result of a logical proof of God would necessarily be an untrue belief. Reason may only bring you to the threshold of the domain of faith, and to apply reason to anything that lies beyond reason's reach is to "degrade" the irrational into the rational, which implies that you misunderstand it.
Structuralism
is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field (for instance, mythology) as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. But many French intellectuals perceived it to have a wider application, and the model was soon modified and applied to other fields, such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory and architecture. This ushered in the dawn of structuralism as not just a method, but also an intellectual movement that came to take existentialism's pedestal in 1960s France.
Structuralism enjoyed much popularity, and its general stance of antihumanism was in sheer opposition to the Sartrean existentialism that preceded it. But in the 1970s, it came under internal fire from critics who accused it of being too rigid and ahistorical. However, many of structuralism's theorists, from Michel Foucault to Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence on continental philosophy, and many of the fundamental assumptions of its critics, that is, of adherents of poststructuralism, are but a continuation of structuralism.[1]
Structuralism isn't only applied within literary theory. There are also structuralist theories that exist within mathematics, philosophy of science, anthropology and in sociology. According to Alison Assiter, there are four common ideas regarding structuralism that form an 'intellectual trend'. Firstly, the structure is what determines the position of each element of a whole. Secondly, structuralists believe that every system has a structure. Thirdly, structuralists are interested in 'structural' laws that deal with coexistence rather than changes. And finally structures are the 'real things' that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.
Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of continental philosophers and critical theorists who wrote with tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The prefix "post" refers to the fact that many contributors, such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva, rejected structuralism and became quite critical of it. In direct contrast to structuralism's claims of an independent signifier, superior to the signified, post-structuralism views the signifier and signified as inseparable but not united. The Post-structuralist movement is closely related to postmodernism-but the two concepts are not synonymous.
While post-structuralism is difficult to define or summarize, it can be broadly understood as a body of distinct reactions to structuralism. There are two main reasons for this difficulty. First, it rejects definitions that claim to have discovered absolute "truths" or facts about the world. Second, very few thinkers have willingly accepted the label 'post-structuralist'; rather, they have been labeled as such by others. Consequently, no one has felt compelled to construct a "manifesto" of post-structuralism. Indeed, it would be inconsistent with post-structuralist concepts to codify itself in such a way.[2]
Hermeneutics may be described as the development and study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts. In contemporary usage in religious studies, hermeneutics refers to the study of the interpretation of religious texts.
It is more broadly used in contemporary philosophy to denote the study of theories and methods of the interpretation of all texts and systems of meaning. The concept of "text" is here extended beyond written documents to any number of objects subject to interpretation, such as experiences. A hermeneutic is also defined as a specific system or method for interpretation, or a specific theory of interpretation. However, the contemporary philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has said that hermeneutics is an approach rather than a method and, further, that the hermeneutic circle is the central problem of interpretation.
Essentially, hermeneutics involves cultivating the ability to understand things from somebody else's point of view, and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their outlook. Hermeneutics is the process of applying this understanding to interpreting the meaning of written texts and symbolic artifacts (such as art or sculpture or architecture), which may be either historic or contemporary.
Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, and design, as well as in marketing and business and the interpretation of history, law and culture in the late 20th century.
Postmodernism is an aesthetic, literary, political or social philosophy, which was the basis of the attempt to describe a condition, or a state of being, or something concerned with changes to institutions and conditions (as in Giddens, 1990) as postmodernity. In other words, postmodernism is the "cultural and intellectual phenomenon", especially since the 1920s' new movements in the arts, while postmodernity focuses on social and political outworkings and innovations globally, especially since the 1960s in the West.
The term postmodern is described by Merriam-Webster as meaning either of, relating to, or being an era after a modern one or of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature), or finally of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language.