By the end the nineteenth century science, rather than philosophy, was the discipline that stood first and foremost in peoples minds in their quest for truth. Indeed scientific reasoning influenced many early twentieth century philosophers, who sought truth in logical investigation of thoughts and language rather than grand philosophical systems. Such philosophers belonged to the school of analytic philosophy, one of the two main schools of Western philosophy which sprung up during the twentieth century. Philosophers such as Frege and Bertrand Russell worked towards a mathematical scheme for analysing the factual content of thoughts, and later this lead to a view of truth, espoused by the Vienna Circle of philosophers, which excluded ethics or aesthetics as being things that could not be accounted for by means of mathematical tautologies or empirical facts.
The other strand of Western philosophy that developed during the twentieth century was the Continental school, which rejected the view that scientific and logical analysis were the best means of handling philosophical problems. Many philosophers in this school also take into account culture and history when trying to understand phenomena, and many philosophers were influenced in particular by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War. Edmund Husserl was the first to break from the prevailing analytic view by discussing the role of subjective experience in viewing phenomena. A major influence on all following continental philosophers was the work of Martin Heidegger, who turn the focus of his enquiry on the nature of Being In France, Sartre developed his philosophy of existentialism and Camus asked how one deals with the conflicting dichotomies of human existence. Read the rest of this entry »
