19th-century philosophy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the 18th century the philosophies of The Enlightenment began to have a dramatic effect, the landmark works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau influencing a new generation of thinkers. In the late 18th century a movement known as Romanticism sought to combine the formal rationality of the past, with a greater and more immediate emotional and organic sense of the world. Key ideas that sparked this change were evolution, as postulated by Erasmus, Darwin and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and what might now be called emergent order, such as the free market of Adam Smith. Pressures for egalitarianism, and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.
Contents |
[edit] 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 participated in, and drove, many of these changes.
[edit] Influences from the late Enlightenment
The last third of the 18th century produced a host of ideas and works which would both systematize previous philosophy, and present a deep challenge to the basis of how philosophy had been systematized. Immanuel Kant is a name that most would mention as being among the most important of influences, as would Jean-Jacques Rousseau. While both of these philosophers were products of the 18th century and its assumptions, they pressed at the boundaries. In trying to explain the nature of the state and government, Rousseau would challenge the basis of government with his declaration that "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". Kant, while attempting to preserve axiomic skepticism, was forced to argue that we do not see reality, nor do we speak of it, only how it appears to us.
One of the first philosophers to attempt to synthesize these influence was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose working out of Kantian metaphysics included incorporation of what would become the major movement in European arts and letters for the next 50 years, Romanticism. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, he argues that the self posits itself and is a self-producing and changing process.
[edit] List of philosophers
- Immanuel Kant, 1724 - 1804
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 1729 - 1781
- Moses Mendelssohn, 1729 - 1786
- Johann Georg Hamann, 1730 - 1788
- Thomas Jefferson, 1743 - 1826
- Johann Gottfried von Herder, 1744 - 1803
- Jeremy Bentham, 1748 - 1832
- Solomon Maimon, 1754 - 1800
- Friedrich Schiller, 1759 - 1805
- Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759 - 1797
- Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762 - 1814
- Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767 - 1835
- Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, 1768 - 1834
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 - 1831
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, 1775 - 1854
- Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1776 - 1841
- Bernard Bolzano, 1781 - 1848
- Karl C.F. Krause, 1781 - 1832
- Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788 - 1860
- Auguste Comte, 1798 - 1857
- Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, 1804 - 1872
- John Stuart Mill, 1806 - 1873
- Charles Darwin, 1809 - 1882
- Alexander Herzen, 1812 - 1870
- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, 1813 - 1855
- Mikhail Bakunin, 1814 - 1876
- Karl Marx, 1818 - 1883
- Frederick Engels, 1820 - 1895
- Herbert Spencer, 1820 - 1903
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1821 - 1881
- Wilhelm Dilthey, 1833 - 1911
- Thomas Hill Green, 1836 - 1882
- Franz Brentano, 1838 - 1907
- Ernst Mach, 1838 - 1916
- Charles Sanders Peirce, 1839 - 1914
- William James, 1842 - 1910
- Peter Kropotkin, 1842 - 1921
- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844 - 1900
- Georg F.L.P. Cantor, 1845 - 1918
- Francis Herbert Bradley, 1846 - 1924
- Bernard Bosanquet, 1848 - 1923
- Gottlob Frege, 1848 - 1925
- Hans Vaihinger, 1852 - 1933
- Josiah Royce, 1855 - 1916
- Sigmund Freud, 1856 - 1939
- Henri Bergson, 1859 - 1941
- John Dewey, 1859 - 1952
- Edmund Husserl, 1859 - 1938
- Lou Andreas Salomé, 1861 - 1937
- Alfred North Whitehead, 1861 - 1947
- George Santayana, 1863 - 1952
- John Ellis McTaggart, 1866 - 1925
- Bertrand Russell, 1872 - 1970