Characteristics of contemporary PHILOSOPHY

In this lesson from a TEACHER we will review the characteristics of contemporary philosophy, which is the period in the history of philosophy that begins at the end of the 19th century and continues to this day and continues to modern philosophy, ranging from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Hegel in the nineteenth, through the rationalists, empiricists and idealism Kantian. As we will see, contemporary philosophy breaks with its predecessor, although it bears certain similarities. Here is a summary to be able to understand the history of the most recent philosophy, take notes!

Before talking about the characteristics of contemporary philosophy, we will talk about the differences that exist with respect to modern philosophy. The central theme of the modern philosophy It will be the nature and the subject as its center and as a starting point for knowledge. Ontology is replaced by gnoseology and the concept of truth and reality also changes.

The contemporary philosophy is a true turning point,

a break with the previous philosophy and a recognition of the power of reason that analyzes, creates and transforms the world. New philosophical currents emerge, analytical philosophy, hermeneutics, Marxism, vitalism, the positivism, structuralism, neopositivism, existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, etc…

This time the central theme is the human being, his essence and the question of language, begins to acquire relevance.

The philosophy of the nineteenth century, supposes a rejection of Kantian philosophy, which led to the emergence of different schools of thought.

Next we will see the main currents of contemporary philosophy of the nineteenth century, as well as its most prominent representatives.

• German idealism: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
• Existentialism: Kierkegaard and Shopenhauer
• Vitalism: Nietzsche
• Positivism: Auguste Comte
• Utilitarianism: Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
• Materialismhistorical: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
• Schoolpragmatist: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey
• Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl
• Philosophyanalytics: Gottlob Frege
• Feminism: Helen Taylor, Harriet Tylor Mill

To attend to the characteristics of contemporary philosophy, we must know the different currents that took place in this vast era.

The philosophy of the twentieth century is the daughter of a series of social, economic, political, scientific and philosophical problems, and it moves between affirmation and rejection with all previous thought.

• Philosophyanalytics: Russell, Whitehead, George Edward Moore, Carnap, Neurat, and Wittgenstein
• Existentialism: Sartre, Heiddeger, Simon de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Jaspers and Camus.
• Structuralism: Seassure
• Poststructuralism: Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida.
• Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur
• Phenomenology: Merleau –Ponty
• Feminism: Angela Davis, Celia Amorós, Amelia Valcárcel and Shulamith Firestone
• Utilitarianism: Peter Singer
• SchoolfromFrankfurt: W. Adorno, M. Horkheimer, J. Habermas, Walter Benjamin and H. Marcuse
• Objectivism: Ayn Rand
• Generativism: Noam Chomsky

We have chosen these two geniuses of Western thought as representatives of contemporary philosophy because they begins with the first and it could be said that the second constitutes the end of metaphysics as the foundation of everything that there are. From this author, the human being will have to be understood as situated in a space and a time, and nothing else.

Comte (positivism)

Positivism defends that the only valid knowledge is the scientific one and its highest representatives are Saint-Simon, J.S. Mill and TO. Comte.

The French Revolution, the birth of utopian socialism French and the apogee of science, mark the entire philosophy of this author, who seeks a transformation of the society from a previous ideological transformation, it is necessary to change our ideas in order to change the world. At this point, an idealistic touch can be observed when affirming that ideas are precisely the only ones capable of revolutionizing society.

M. Heidegger (existentialism)

The best known work of him, Being and Time he tries to elaborate an ontology that allows to recover the sense of being, starting from the one that poses the question of being, that is, being. Later, his thinking takes a turn to approach being as self-revelation. At the same time, the author denounces the forgetfulness, on the part of philosophy, of the question of being.

Those responsible for this forgetfulness are, for Heidegger, Plato Y Aristotle, by confusing it with the entity and transforming it into a copulative verb, that which defines everything, and yet cannot define itself. Because being enters the plane of the ontological and the entity, of the ontic, the first eternal, and the second temporal.

A) Yes, Heidegger supposes the culmination of metaphysics in favor of a existential analytics, since it is the entity, who asks the question about the sense of being, the Dasein or be-there). But first, it will be necessary to analyze the entity, that is, the one who asks about the meaning of being.