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The increasingly technical character of philosophical discourse during the present century, particularly in England and the United States, has tended to divert attention from the fact that philosophy is as much a product of the age in which it is treated as of the ideas of philosophers who have come before. In a century marked by revolution and world war, the rise of racist nationalism and genocide, the development of weapons of mass destruction, the bloody fall of colonial empires and the sudden collapse of Communism, it should perhaps not come's a surprise that philosophy, no less than literature and the fine arts, bears the scars of a period of upheaval and violence without precedent in the world's history. In A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Christian Delacampagne reviews the discipline's divergent and dramatic course and shows that its greatest figures, even the most unworldly among them, were deeply affected by events of their time. From Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose famous Tractatus was actually composed in the trenches during World War I, to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the one a converted Jew who found himself barred from public life with Hitler's coming to power, the other a member of the Nazi party who later refused to repudiate German war crimes; from Bertrand Russell, whose lifelong pacifism led him to turn from logic and mathematics to social and moral questions, and Jean Paul Sartre, who made philosophy an occasion for direct and personal political engagement, to Rudolf Carnap, a committed socialist, and Karl Popper, a resolute opponent of Communism; from the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School to the contemporary work of philosophers asvariously minded as Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam -- the thinking of these philosophers, and scores of others, cannot be understood without being placed in the context of the times in which they lived. Delacampagne's distinctive approach enables him to treat the history of twentieth century philosophy in a unified fashion, seeing its two major branches as complementary rather than as unalterably opposed. He traces the roots of Anglo-American and Continental philosophy to their common source in the work of Frege and the late nineteenth century revolt against Kant, and gives a comprehensive account of their subsequent development. This remarkable work, which now appears for the first time in English, revised and corrected by the author, is indeed a history of philosophy in the twentieth century. "The emphasis in the title of Delacampagne's volume should be on the preposition "in" since this is not just a history of twentieth-century philosophy but a history that tries to take some account of the cultural and political setting as well as the specific content of what various philosophers and philosophical movements have said during this period." -- David Pellauer, DePaul University, editor of Philosophy Today

"[These] pages are filled with the aspirations of philosophic thinkers, and anyone who reads its narratives will experience the hopefulness that has accompanied 20th century reappraisals of the philosophic tradition. Delacampagne....develops a richly detailed picture of the works of philosophy by paying attention to the range of the philosophic voice; he notes the harsher themes without ignoring the redemptive energy that guides them. In doing so, he proves to be an enlivening guide to the labyrinth of recent philosophic thought."

Neal Leavitt, Boston Book Review, December 1999

A History of Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Search Results