THE PHILOSOPHICAL CULTURE IN XIX-XX

CENTURIES

BRIEF HISTORICAL OUTLINE• With the tumultuous years of 1789-1815,

European culture was transformed by revolution, war and disruption.

• By ending many of the social and cultural props of the previous century, the stage was set for dramatic economic and political change.

• European philosophy reflected on, participated in, and drove, many of these changes.

PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS AND TENDENCIES

• German idealism• One of the most famous opponents of

idealism in the first half of the German 19th century was Ludwig Feuerbach\, who advocated materialism and atheism

• Utilitarianism

• In early 19th century Britain,Jeremy bentham and John Stuart Mill promoted the idea that actions are right as they maximize happiness, and happiness alone.

Marxism Marxism is a sociopolitical and economic view based on the philosophy of dialectical materialism, which opposes idealism in favour of the materialist viewpoint.Marxism had a profound influence on the history of the 20th Century.ExistentialismExistentialism as a philosophical movement is properly a 20th-century movement, but its major antecedents, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche wrote long before the rise of existentialism.

• Kierkegaard wrote of 19th-century Europe, "Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man."

PositivismAuguste Comte, the self-professed founder of modern sociology, had hoped to order the sciences in increasing degrees of complexity from mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a new discipline called "sociology", which is the study of the "dynamics and statics of society".

• Pragmatism (Pragmaticism)The American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James developed the pragmatist philosophy in the late 19th century.

TranscendentalismTranscendentalism was rooted in Immanuel Kant's transcendence and German idealism, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson andHenry David Thoreau. The main belief was in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

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