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. Key Concepts Structuralism: behind the diversity of cultural phenomena lie universal unconscious structures of the human mind — binary, relational, transformational Myth: myths are not chaotic narratives but systems of binary oppositions (raw/cooked, nature/culture, high/low) that resolve existential contradictions in society Mythemes: the minimal units of a myth (analogous to phonemes in linguistics); meaning emerges from relations between mythemes, not from isolated elements The Raw and the Cooked (1964): the cooked is nature transformed by culture — cuisine is a universal symbolic system that encodes the nature/culture distinction Savage mind (La Pensée sauvage, 1962): the thought of “primitive” societies is not inferior — it is a science of the concrete, of the sensible, as rigorous as modern scientific thought Bricolage vs. engineering: the bricoleur uses elements at hand for new purposes; the engineer starts from abstract concepts — myth is a form of intellectual bricolage Kinship and exchange: kinship structures (incest prohibition, exogamy) are the foundation of all society — woman as sign in exchange between groups (later feminist critique) Influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure — structural linguistics Marcel Mauss — anthropology of gift and exchange Marx — deep structures beneath the surface of phenomena Freud — unconscious and structure Influenced Foucault — episteme as unconscious structure Derrida — deconstruction of structuralism Lacan — structuralist psychoanalysis Semiology and communication theory Narratology (Greimas, Genette) Works The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949); Tristes Tropiques (1955); Structural Anthropology (1958); The Savage Mind (1962); Mythologiques (4 vols., 1964–1971). ...

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 Washington D.C. 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. Key Concepts The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): totalitarianism (Nazism and Stalinism) is a radically new phenomenon — not classical tyranny; it is based on total terror, ideology, and the destruction of public space and human singularity The Human Condition (vita activa, 1958): three fundamental activities: Labor: metabolism with nature, production of the necessary (animal laborans) Work: fabrication of durable objects, artificial world (homo faber) Action: the initiation of the genuinely new among humans — the only directly political activity; reveals who one is (not what) Banality of Evil (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963): Adolf Eichmann was not a monster, but a bureaucrat without thought; radical evil does not require perversity — mere absence of reflection (thoughtlessness) suffices Public space: politics as a space of appearance among equals, where words and actions reveal identity — against the privatization of political life Natality (counterpart to Heideggerian mortality): each human being is a new beginning — the capacity to initiate something radically new is the basis of political freedom Influenced by Heidegger — fundamental ontology, analysis of existence (but criticizes his Nazi engagement) Karl Jaspers — existentialism and communication Aristotle — vita activa, politics as the highest mode of life Kant — judgment, sensus communis, political philosophy Influenced Contemporary political philosophy Studies on totalitarianism and democracy Theory of moral judgment Judith Butler — precariousness and political life Works The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); The Human Condition (1958); Between Past and Future (1961); Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963); On Revolution (1963); The Life of the Mind (posthumous, 1978). ...

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. Key Concepts Philosophical hermeneutics: understanding is not a scientific method — it is the mode of being of historical Dasein; not something we do, but something that happens to us Hermeneutic circle: understanding a text requires pre-understanding (of the whole), which is revised by the parts, which are illuminated by the revised whole — ascending spiral, not vicious circle Prejudice (Vorurteil): rehabilitates prejudices (pre-judgments) as a condition of all understanding — they are not obstacles to overcome, but structures of openness to the world; the Enlightenment erred in denouncing all prejudice Tradition and authority: tradition transmits sedimented truths that critical reason cannot simply discard — it is a condition of our hermeneutic situation Fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung): in understanding a text from the past, the interpreter’s horizon and the text’s horizon fuse; there is no “pure” access to the original meaning (against Dilthey’s historicism) Language as universal medium: “Being that can be understood is language”; all human experience is mediated by language — hermeneutics is the universal dimension of philosophy Dialogue: authentic conversation is the model of understanding — the other tells us something we did not know; the question opens the horizon Influenced by Heidegger — being-in-the-world, historicity, language Hegel — dialectics and historical mediation Plato — Socratic dialogue as model Friedrich Schleiermacher — romantic hermeneutics (critical starting point) Wilhelm Dilthey — hermeneutics of human sciences (supersedes) Influenced Paul Ricoeur — hermeneutics of text and narrative Habermas — famous debate on tradition vs. critique (Gadamer-Habermas) Literary theory (reception: Jauss, Iser) Philosophy of law and bioethics Works Truth and Method (1960); Reason in the Age of Science (1976); Praise of Theory (1983); The Heritage of Europe (1989). ...

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. Key Concepts Deconstruction: not destruction, but careful reading that reveals the internal tensions of a text — how the concepts that it excludes or suppresses return to destabilize it Metaphysics of presence: Western philosophy privileges presence, speech, origin, identity — Derrida shows that all presence is mediated by difference and absence Différance (neologism): play of differ (spatial distinction) and deference (temporal deferment); meaning is never fully present — it is always postponed Supplement: the element considered “external” or “secondary” (writing in relation to speech, in Rousseau) proves to be constitutive of the “original” Text: “There is nothing outside the text” — does not mean that only books exist, but that all experience is mediated by structures of signification Pharmakon (analysis of Plato): writing is at once remedy and poison — an irreducible ambivalence that philosophy attempts, unsuccessfully, to resolve Influenced by Husserl — phenomenology (first book: Speech and Phenomena) Heidegger — destruction of metaphysics (radicalizes the Destruktion) Nietzsche — critique of metaphysics and interpretive play Ferdinand de Saussure — structural linguistics (critique) Sigmund Freud — trace, unconscious, difference Influenced Literary theory (deconstruction in the USA: Paul de Man) Postcolonial studies (Spivak, translator of Of Grammatology) Queer theory Philosophy of law (Force of Law) Works Of Grammatology (1967); Writing and Difference (1967); Speech and Phenomena (1967); Margins of Philosophy (1972); Force of Law (1994); Specters of Marx (1993). ...

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. Key Concepts Veil of ignorance (veil of ignorance): to determine principles of justice, imagine an “original position” where the parties do not know their place in society (class, race, gender, talents) — the veil ensures impartiality Original position: hypothetical contractualist thought experiment — what principles would rational agents choose behind the veil? An update of Kant and Rousseau against utilitarianism Two principles of justice: Principle of liberty: each person has an equal right to basic liberties compatible with the same liberties for all Difference principle: socioeconomic inequalities are just only if: a) connected to offices open to all and b) benefit the least advantaged members of society Lexical priority: the principle of liberty takes precedence over the difference principle — liberty is not sacrificed for economic gain Justice as fairness (Justice as Fairness): society as a system of fair cooperation among free and equal persons Political liberalism (Political Liberalism, 1993): revision — the principles of justice need not rest on a comprehensive philosophical foundation, but on “overlapping consensus” among different reasonable doctrines in a pluralistic democracy Influenced by Kant — practical reason, autonomy, categorical imperative Rousseau — social contract and general will Locke — natural rights and limited government John Stuart Mill — liberalism (but criticizes utilitarianism) Influenced The whole of contemporary political philosophy (mandatory point of reference) Robert Nozick — Anarchy, State, and Utopia (libertarian critique of Rawls) Habermas — Rawls-Habermas debate on public reason Theory of international law and global justice Works A Theory of Justice (1971); Political Liberalism (1993); The Law of Peoples (1999); Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001). ...

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. Key Concepts Performativity of gender: gender is not what we are (substance), but what we do — a set of repeated acts, citations of norms, gestures and discourses that produce the effect of a natural essence. There is no gender identity behind gender acts Citationality: performativity is not conscious theatrical performance — it is compulsory citation of norms that preexist the subject; the subject does not freely choose its gender (against vulgar readings) Heterosexual matrix: system of norms that prescribes sex-gender-desire as coherent and aligned; the queer and the trans are the bodies that the norm excludes to constitute itself — the “abjected” Precariousness (Frames of War, 2009): lives are not equally grievable — politics determines which lives count as lives; precarious lives (racialized, queer, migrants) are those whose mourning is denied Critique of essentialist feminism: there is no “woman” as a stable political subject prior to politics — the identity “woman” is produced by feminist politics itself; this does not invalidate feminism, but complexifies it Influenced by Simone de Beauvoir — “one is not born a woman, but becomes one” (starting point) Foucault — power, discourse, production of the subject Derrida — performativity and citationality J.L. Austin — theory of speech acts Hegel — recognition and intersubjective desire Influenced Queer theory (Eve Sedgwick, Lee Edelman) Trans studies and non-binary identities Political philosophy of precariousness Contemporary feminisms (intersectional, queer, decolonial) Works Gender Trouble (1990); Bodies That Matter (1993); The Psychic Life of Power (1997); Excitable Speech (1997); Frames of War (2009); Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015). ...

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. Key Concepts Falsifiability (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934): a scientific theory is not one that can be verified (induction — the problem of Hume), but one that can be falsified — that admits the possibility of being refuted by experiments. Psychoanalysis and Marxism are not sciences: they are immune to refutation Problem of induction (asymmetrical solution): no number of observations confirms a universal law; a single counterexample falsifies it. Science progresses through the survival of the most audacious theories under severe scrutiny Critical rationalism: reason advances through bold conjectures and rigorous refutations — not through secure inductive accumulation Evolutionary epistemology: the growth of knowledge is analogous to biological evolution — variations (conjectures) eliminated by selection (refutation) Open Society (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945): societies that permit criticism, reform, and peaceful change of institutions; critique of Plato, Hegel, and Marx as “enemies” — historicisms that believe in inevitable laws of history and justify authoritarianism Historicism: the belief that there are historical laws that allow us to predict the future — Popper argues it is a dangerous fallacy; the future is open Influenced by Kant — limits of knowledge and the active role of the subject Hume — problem of induction (point of departure) Einstein — science as bold, refutable conjecture Influenced Contemporary philosophy of science (Lakatos, Feyerabend — disciples and critics) Thomas Kuhn (debate on scientific progress) Contemporary political liberalism George Soros — applied the “open society” as a political and philanthropic project Works The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934); The Poverty of Historicism (1944); The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945); Conjectures and Refutations (1963); Objective Knowledge (1972). ...

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 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). ...