Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Achille Mbembe Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, Cameroon. He trained in history and philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris I) and received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is currently a senior professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbembe is considered one of the most influential African intellectuals today, with work that articulates African history, postcolonial theory, political philosophy, and cultural criticism. He writes in French; his principal works have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, and other languages. ...

Albert Camus Born in 1913 in French Algeria, into a poor settler (pied-noir) family, Albert Camus lost his father in infancy, in the First World War, and was raised by his illiterate, partly deaf mother in a humble district of Algiers. Tuberculosis would mark his entire life. A journalist and writer, he edited the newspaper Combat in the French Resistance and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at the age of 44. Close to existentialism — though he rejected the label — he broke with Sartre over disagreements about revolutionary violence. He died in 1960 in a car accident, at the age of 46. ...

Bertrand Russell Born in 1872 into an influential British aristocratic family — he was the grandson of a prime minister — Bertrand Russell had one of the longest and most varied careers in philosophy: he was a logician, mathematician, essayist, educator, and political activist, spanning nearly a century of history. He studied at Cambridge, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, and, faithful to his pacifism, was imprisoned during the First World War and led, in his nineties, the campaign against nuclear weapons (the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955). He is, with Frege and Wittgenstein, one of the founders of analytic philosophy. ...

Claude Lévi-Strauss French anthropologist and philosopher; founder of structuralism in the human sciences. He applied Saussure’s model of linguistics to anthropology, transforming the study of myths, kinship, and “primitive” cultures. Born in Brussels in 1908 and died in Paris in 2009, Lévi-Strauss studied philosophy and law before becoming a professor in Brazil — he taught at the University of São Paulo from 1935 to 1939, during which time he conducted fieldwork among indigenous peoples of Mato Grosso and the Amazon. That direct encounter with Amerindian societies proved decisive: rather than confirming the dominant evolutionist framework, it led him to question radically the hierarchy between “primitive” and “scientific” thought. After returning to Europe and spending the years of the Second World War in exile in New York, he came into close contact with the linguist Roman Jakobson, whose phonological formalism gave Lévi-Strauss the central methodological instrument: the analysis of binary oppositions as the key to deciphering cultural systems. ...

Edmund Husserl Born in 1859 in Prossnitz, in Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire), Edmund Husserl trained as a mathematician before turning to philosophy under the influence of Franz Brentano, from whom he inherited the notion of intentionality. Dissatisfied with the psychologism that reduced logic to laws of the mind, he set out to refound philosophy as a rigorous science, capable of describing experience exactly. He was a professor at Göttingen and Freiburg, where he had Heidegger as his assistant and successor. A Jew, he was stripped of his rights by Nazism and died isolated in 1938; his thousands of manuscripts survived only because a Franciscan monk smuggled them into Belgium. ...

Frantz Fanon Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique (then a French colony). A psychiatrist, essayist, and political militant, he is the most influential figure of African and Caribbean anticolonial philosophy. Trained in medicine and psychiatry in France (Lyon), he served as chief of psychiatry at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria from 1953. Confronted with the atrocities of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), he joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) and became one of the principal intellectual voices of the anticolonial cause. He died of leukemia in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961, aged 36, days after the publication of Les damnés de la terre. ...

Gilles Deleuze French philosopher; created a philosophy of difference and multiplicity that subverts the metaphysical tradition centered on identity. Produced solo works and collaborations with Félix Guattari. Key Concepts Difference in itself (Difference and Repetition, 1968): difference is not derived from identity — it is originary; identity is secondary to difference. Critique of the tradition that always subordinated difference to the Same Rhizome (with Guattari): against the arborescent model (single root, hierarchy, center), the rhizome is horizontal multiplicity without point of origin or destination — connects any point with any other. Metaphor for thought, politics, and culture Lines of flight (lignes de fuite): every social and subjective system contains forces of deterritorialization that escape dominant structures — creation of the new, resistance to control Plane of immanence: reality has no transcendence; everything is immanent to a single plane of forces and intensities — against Platonic dualism and theological transcendence Desire as production (with Guattari): against Freud (desire as lack) — desire is productive, affirmative force; capitalism captures desiring production but it always overflows Body without organs: surface of intensities without prior organization — against the organism as normative model of the body Concept of concept: philosophy creates concepts — it does not represent, contemplate, or communicate; creating concepts is the philosopher’s specific task Influenced by Bergson — duration, multiplicity, creation (Bergsonism, 1966) Nietzsche — will to power, eternal return, affirmation (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962) Spinoza — immanence and power (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1970) Hume — radical empiricism and associationism Influenced Cultural studies and queer theory Cognitive sciences and biology (self-organization) Architecture, contemporary art Post-Marxist political theory Works Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962); Bergsonism (1966); Difference and Repetition (1968); The Logic of Sense (1969); Anti-Oedipus (1972, with Guattari); A Thousand Plateaus (1980, with Guattari); What is Philosophy? (1991, with Guattari). ...

H.L.A. Hart British legal philosopher, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford (1952–1968); The Concept of Law (1961) is the most influential work of 20th-century legal positivism and reshaped the terms of debate over the nature, validity, and bindingness of law. Key Concepts Primary and secondary rules: the central distinction of The Concept of Law. Primary rules impose duties of conduct (do not kill, keep contracts). Secondary rules are meta-rules about primary rules, subdivided into: (a) the rule of recognition — the criterion that identifies which norms belong to the legal system; (b) rules of change — procedures for creating, altering, and repealing primary rules; (c) rules of adjudication — confer authority on officials to settle disputes Rule of recognition: the norm that defines the criteria of legal validity in a given system — it is not itself valid or invalid but exists as a social fact, accepted by officials from an “internal point of view.” It answers “what is law?” without appealing to morality Internal point of view: whoever accepts a rule as a standard of conduct and criticism — not merely from fear of sanctions — adopts the internal point of view. Understanding law requires grasping this standpoint, not merely describing external behaviour (as Austinian behaviourism did) Open texture: general language inevitably has clear cases of application and a penumbra of uncertainty where the norm does not determine the outcome. In hard cases judges exercise discretion — they choose, within limits, which interpretation to adopt. Hart denies that law always has a ready-made answer (the criticism Dworkin will level against him) Conceptual separation of law and morality: unlike natural law theory, the legal validity of a norm depends on formal criteria (membership in the system), not on its moral content. An unjust norm may be valid; a morally correct norm may not be law. This does not imply that law ought not to be criticised morally — only that such criticism operates on a distinct plane Minimum content of natural law: despite the separation, Hart concedes that any legal system that aspires to survival must incorporate a nucleus of norms (protection of life, property, keeping of promises) imposed by the contingencies of human nature — the “minimum content of natural law” Hart–Fuller debate (1958): in the Harvard Law Review, Hart and Lon Fuller conducted the most celebrated exchange in 20th-century anglophone legal philosophy. Against Fuller’s thesis that law has an “inner morality,” Hart insists that validity and morality are conceptually distinct Influenced by Jeremy Bentham — precursor of legal positivism, critic of natural law John Austin — command theory and the notion of law as the sovereign’s command (Hart critiques and supersedes Austin) Ludwig Wittgenstein — philosophy of language, meaning as use, open texture J.L. Austin — Oxford ordinary-language philosophy Hans Kelsen — normativist positivism (Hart engages critically with the Grundnorm) Influenced Ronald Dworkin — Taking Rights Seriously (1977) and Law’s Empire (1986) are the principal philosophical response to Hart Joseph Raz — The Concept of a Legal System (1970) and the authority thesis Neil MacCormick — institutional positivism The entire tradition of anglophone analytical jurisprudence Works Causation in the Law (1959, with Tony Honoré); The Concept of Law (1961; 2nd posthumous ed. 1994, with “Postscript”); Law, Liberty, and Morality (1963); The Morality of the Criminal Law (1964); Punishment and Responsibility (1968); Essays on Bentham (1982); Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (1983). ...

Hannah Arendt German-American political philosopher, Jewish, student of Heidegger and Jaspers. Thinker of totalitarianism, political freedom, and human action. One of the most original voices of the 20th century. Trained in the German phenomenological and existential tradition, Arendt wrote her doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in Saint Augustine, under the supervision of Jaspers. The rise of Nazism violently interrupted her path: as a Jew, she was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and, after years as a stateless person in France, emigrated to the United States, where she became a naturalized American citizen. The experience of uprooting, persecution, and the loss of a common world became the lived ground from which her work asks what it means, in the century of concentration camps and mass refugeehood, to preserve a place for human dignity and plurality. ...

Hans-Georg Gadamer German philosopher; principal representative of philosophical hermeneutics in the 20th century. Student of Heidegger; his work Truth and Method (1960) reformulated the problem of understanding as a fundamental philosophical question. Trained at Marburg in the climate of neo-Kantianism, Gadamer found in Heidegger the decisive turn of his career: the analytic of existence showed that understanding is not one intellectual operation among others but the very mode of being of human beings in the world. His early work centered above all on the Platonic dialogue and the dialectical ethics of Plato, and it was only in maturity — when he already held the chair at Heidelberg — that he published the book that would make his name, written when he was already sixty. Living through the Nazi years without joining the Party — though, like many academics, he signed the 1933 professors’ oath of loyalty to the new regime — and surviving two world wars, Gadamer would gain international recognition only in the second half of the century, becoming one of the most long-lived and respected philosophical voices in Europe. ...

Henri Bergson French philosopher; Nobel Prize in Literature (1927). Criticized scientific mechanism and intellectualism, proposing intuition as a superior philosophical method and duration as the real time of consciousness. Enormous influence in the early twentieth century. Key Concepts Duration (durée): the time lived by consciousness is radically different from the measurable time of science — it is continuous and heterogeneous flux, not succession of discrete instants. The clock spatializes time, falsifying it Intuition: the philosophical method par excellence — intellectual sympathy that inserts itself into the interior of the object, grasping it in its becoming; superior to analytical intelligence, which fragments and spatializes Intelligence vs. intuition: intelligence evolved to act upon matter (carving out, measuring, fabricating); only intuition grasps the living in its duration. Philosophy must overcome intelligence by itself Élan vital (Creative Evolution, 1907): immanent vital force that drives evolution — neither teleological nor mechanistic, but creative and unpredictable; life is continuous invention of new forms Memory (Matter and Memory, 1896): distinction between habit-memory (motor, corporal) and pure memory (image of the past as it was); the present is the tip of the past — no pure present exists Laughter (Laughter, 1900): we laugh at what is mechanical superimposed upon the living — rigidity where we expect flexibility. Comedy is social diagnosis Influenced by Kant — criticism and limits of knowledge (but overcomes idealism) Herbert Spencer — evolution (starting point for critique) William James — pragmatism and experience of time Influenced Merleau Ponty — body and perception Deleuze — Bergsonism (1966): the concept of duration and multiplicity as the basis of his ontology of difference William James — mutual exchange Literary modernism (Proust, the time of memory) Husserl — parallelisms in the critique of objective time Works Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889); Matter and Memory (1896); Laughter (1900); Creative Evolution (1907); Introduction to Metaphysics (1903); The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). ...

Herbert Marcuse Born in Berlin in 1898, Herbert Marcuse fought in the First World War, studied philosophy with Heidegger and Husserl at Freiburg, and joined the Institute for Social Research. Exiled in the United States during Nazism — where he would live for the rest of his life — he became a university professor and, in the 1960s, the “guru of the New Left”: his ideas directly inspired the student movements of 1968, and Angela Davis was his student. ...

Jacques Derrida Algerian-French philosopher; founder of deconstruction. He subverted the Western metaphysical tradition by showing that it is structured by hierarchical binary oppositions and by the metaphysics of presence. Born in El-Biar, on the outskirts of Algiers, into a Jewish family, Derrida trained at the École normale supérieure in Paris and began his philosophical path with a meticulous reading of Husserl’s phenomenology. His explosive entry into intellectual debate came in 1966, with the lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University, in which he questioned the notion of structure as something organized around a stable center — a gesture that distanced him from the then-dominant structuralism and opened what would come to be called post-structuralism. The following year he published, almost simultaneously, three works that fixed his vocabulary and his method, establishing deconstruction not as a doctrine but as a practice of reading attentive to the tensions that each text fails to master. ...

Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher, novelist, and playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, where he met Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong intellectual and romantic companion. A stay in Berlin in the 1930s brought him into direct contact with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, which would become the foundation of his thought. A prisoner of war in 1940–41 and later a central figure of postwar Parisian intellectual life, he made philosophy a public and engaged activity: he founded the review Les Temps Modernes, drew close to Marxism, and, faithful to his refusal of institutional honors, declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964. His death, in 1980, brought tens of thousands into the streets of Paris. ...

John Rawls American political philosopher; A Theory of Justice (1971) relaunched normative political philosophy after decades of dominance by positivism and utilitarianism. The most influential work of 20th-century political philosophy. A professor at Harvard for most of his career, Rawls wrote at a time when many regarded political philosophy as dead, reduced to conceptual analysis or to a history of doctrines. His central problem was to find a conception of justice for the basic institutions of society — the constitution, the economy, the family — that could be accepted by free and equal citizens without appealing to a single comprehensive worldview. Against the dominant utilitarianism, which was willing to sacrifice the well-being of some for the sake of the aggregate sum, Rawls insisted that each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the general welfare cannot override. To articulate this intuition he revived the contractualist tradition of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, but at a higher level of abstraction: the agreement is not about a concrete government, but about the very principles that should govern the basic structure. ...

Judith Butler American philosopher; central figure in queer theory and gender studies. Gender Trouble (1990) transformed the humanities by proposing that gender is not a fixed identity, but a performance. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956, Butler completed her doctorate in philosophy at Yale University in 1984 with a dissertation on the French reception of Hegel. Her intellectual formation draws on French existentialism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism — a combination that enabled her to interrogate categories typically treated as natural, such as “sex,” “gender,” and “subject,” in terms of their historical production. The central problem driving her work is: how do cultural norms fabricate bodies and identities that pass as natural? This question places her at the intersection of continental philosophy, feminist theory, and minority politics. ...

Karl Jaspers German psychiatrist and philosopher, one of the central figures of the philosophy of existence alongside Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He moved from psychiatry (General Psychopathology, 1913) to philosophy, developing a reflection on human existence centered on boundary situations, existential communication, and transcendence. He was Hannah Arendt’s mentor at Heidelberg. After World War II, he became an influential voice on the question of German guilt and the ethical foundations of politics. ...

Karl Popper Austrian-British philosopher. Proposed falsificationism as a criterion for scientific demarcation and defended the open society against totalitarianism. Sharp critic of Marxism and historicism. Born in Vienna in 1902, Popper came of age in intellectual contact with the Vienna Circle — the group of philosophers and scientists who sought to ground knowledge in strict verificationist terms. Rather than joining their programme, however, he turned the question around: the central problem of epistemology is not how we confirm theories, but how we distinguish genuine science from pseudo-science. His answer, falsificationism, holds that the hallmark of a scientific theory is its refutability: a claim is scientific if and only if it is possible to conceive of an observation or experiment that could prove it wrong. This methodological reorientation, set out in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), reshaped the foundations of twentieth-century philosophy of science. ...

Kwame Anthony Appiah Kwame Anthony Appiah was born on 8 May 1954 in London, to a Ghanaian father (Joe Appiah, lawyer and politician) and a British mother (Peggy Cripps). He grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, and studied philosophy at Cambridge (BA and PhD). He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton; he is currently professor at New York University. Appiah is one of the most versatile and influential philosophers in the contemporary anglophone world, with contributions to ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, racial theory, and political philosophy. He is one of the thinkers who has most systematically challenged the presuppositions of “racialism” — the belief that human races exist as biological entities endowed with moral and intellectual essences. ...

Kwame Nkrumah Kwame Nkrumah (21 September 1909 – 27 April 1972) was born in Nkroful, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). He studied in the USA (Lincoln University and University of Pennsylvania) and the United Kingdom (London School of Economics), where he developed his Pan-Africanist ideas in contact with figures such as C.L.R. James and George Padmore. He returned to the Gold Coast in 1947, led the independence movement, and became the first president of Ghana in 1957 — the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in the postwar period. He was deposed in a military coup in 1966 while in Beijing, en route to Hanoi. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Guinea-Conakry, where he died in 1972. Nkrumah is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Pan-Africanism and a central figure of the Organisation of African Unity (founded 1963). ...