THE Philosophycontemporary, chronologically, it lies between some imprecise period from the 19th century to the present day. Some scholars prefer to classify the assumptiontheorists and thoughtsphilosophical produced in the 19th century as part of Modern Philosophy.
However, allowing for a more conceptual and broadly historiographical analysis than a strictly positivist and chronological one, we can conceive that the philosophical productions of the XIX century they come much closer to what was produced in later centuries than in earlier periods.
Furthermore, the prevailing thought in the 20th century, the philosophical schools, the interpretations, the postmodernity, in short, everything that is different in Western Philosophy today, which stands out from Modern Philosophy, was born in the works of nineteenth-century philosophers, such as Auguste Comte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer and Karl Marx.
Know more: Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality
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Historical Context of Contemporary Philosophy
During the Enlightenment, at the end of modernity, there was a common belief that the advancement of science, techniques and knowledge, allied to the popularization of this knowledge through education, would bring the advancemoral of society. O positivism Auguste Comte remains, in a way, on an Enlightenment line, but adds the need for a strictly scientific knowledge and a rigorous social order for social advancement.
Like historiographic method, positivism affirms the need for attention to strict facts of history as a single source of knowledge. already the historical materialism Karl Marx's dialectic affirms the need to understand human history as the history of its material production.
Disagreeing with some Enlightenment ideas that merged to initiate liberal thought and agreeing with others, such as the ideal of equality between men widely spread during the French Revolution, Marx grounds the socialismscientific based on practical and revolutionary political thinking. This time, the idealism Thelemon, philosophical current of modernity represented by thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, is heavily criticized by Marx.
Perhaps, counting the historical facts, the ones that most influenced the beginning of contemporary thought were the French revolutions, American and the Industrial Revolution. In practical terms, the political revolutions brought a new way of governing, moving away from the authoritarianism of the Ancien Regime, while the Industrial Revolution represented an immense technical and scientific advance for Europe.
the german philosopher ArthurSchopenhauer, opposing the idealist vision and the totalizing systems of modern reason, which intended to frame the human being in an entirely rational, launches the concept of Will as a driving force of nature that causes everything, at random, independently of any human will and any divine existence.
Kierkegaard launches the idea that Philosophy should pay attention to individual human life, so that the human being himself understands and conforms to his condition, often permeated by anguish.
Of all the thinkers who marked the beginning of contemporaneity, perhaps it is in FriedrichNietzsche the biggest break with traditional philosophy and a great enunciation of what would come in the 20th century. One criticalbiting of what became the philosophy produced between Socrates and Kant (with the exception of Spinoza), that is, almost all of Western Philosophy.
Nietzsche criticized the human being's pretension of reaching an objective and purely rational truth, basing knowledge on what he called perspectivism. In addition to the critique of the theory of knowledge and the foundation of a new philosophical method to understand the world, Nietzsche elaborates a criticism of moral systems that they intend to establish a unilateral valuation and despise the historical and cultural origin of moral values.
In a cosmological brand, Nietzsche works with the concept of will to power, which would be a kind of force that drives everything through chance promoted by the clash of opposing natural forces. It would be the Will to Power that would move nature and human drives, animal life, cosmic determinations, etc.
The intense nineteenth century also accompanied the birth of new sciences, such as Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology. Amidst technical advances and new ways of explaining reality, Western thought was establishing itself as a motto for the future development, despite philosophers such as Nietzsche doubting the supposed progress leveraged by modernity, which would reach its peak in the XIX century.
The twentieth century begins with the suspicion that Enlightenment and modern theories might not be so right. THE First World War was one of those factors and the Holocaust it was the height of contemporary pessimism about science and technology. Theodor Adornment and Max Horkheimer, in the book Dialectics of Enlightenment, classify the Holocaust as the height of barbarism that humanity has reached due to what they called “instrumental reason”.
The instrumental reason is the non-reflective use of science and techniques aiming for a purpose. Capitalism had already been using rationality as an instrument of power and Nazism, through the gas chamber and the cruel scientific experiments that used concentration camp prisoners as guinea pigs, marked contemporaneity as a time when the scientific advance did not guarantee human moral advancement.
This criticism by Adorno and Horkheimer falls, above all, on the Enlightenment ideal that believed that the advancement and popularization of knowledge would guarantee social advancement.
Read too: Adorno and Horkheimer's most famous concept
What characterizes Contemporary Philosophy
We can say that the main brand of Contemporary Philosophy is the criticism of philosophical models developed up to modernity. Nietzsche, when criticizing the standard of rationality that, according to him, left aside the animal and natural potency of the human being and the pointing out that the moral that we had as natural was the result of an inversion of ancient values, puts the entire history of Philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher affiliated with the Vienna Circle, investigated the conditionsgiveslanguage through logic and analytical philosophy. For him, in his youth, philosophical problems were problems of unresolved language, which also nullifies the philosophical production made until then.
to Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist philosopher, human freedom was unconditional, so that the human being would, paradoxically, condemned to have this freedom. For Sartre and for existentialists in general, there was no essence that would define the human being. contrary to ancient and modern thinking that affirmed rationality as essential to the human animal).
Thus, for this existentialist what made man a anguished and helpless being, since he would be totally responsible for himself through his actions. According to Sartre, the human being would have created the idea of God to get rid of the weight of existence.
the philosophers of Frankfurt School, like Adorno and Horkheimer, they dedicated themselves to a philosophy with a strong political tone, which would update Marxism for the 20th century and revise old conceptions about knowledge, science and technique. HannahArendt also part of the political question. The German Jewish philosopher (like Adorno and Horkheimer) experiences the horror of the Nazi persecution, which motivates her philosophical performance in order to theorize the phenomenon of totalitarianism.
More recent philosophers who started their productions in the second half of the 20th century, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, found a thought that became known as poststructuralist (Called by some, critically, as postmodern thinking). Poststructuralism aimed at break the formal structure of thought based on reason and rigorous method, establishing that Philosophy must act through free thought to reach its conclusions.
Also access: Sartre's Existentialism: Understand Theory
What is reason in Contemporary Philosophy
Contemporary Philosophy, in general, has tried to establish a new standard of rationality. Thinking that reason was not that traditional mark of the human being and that the positivist impulse could establish an instrumental relationship between human beings and rationality, reason starts to be evoked as instrument of intellectual emancipation through reflection on reason itself.
The moderns saw rationality as an instrument that would allow the human being master nature itself. If the Holocaust was the mark of the instrumentalization of reason as a means of political domination, today, we also see that the domination of nature has catastrophic consequences for humanity, due to degradationenvironmental.
THE Moral Philosophy and contemporary ethics have also gone through a process of revisit and restructuring of their moral theoretical systems for realizing that reason is no guarantee of morally correct actions. In fact, what was understood as morally correct action until the 19th century is now being questioned by philosophers such as Marx and Nietzsche, who see the need for social changes with the purpose of, in their judgments, establishing a new type of society, for Marx, and a new, stronger human type, according to Nietzsche.
main philosophers
FriedrichNietzsche: the German thinker is one of the most characteristic of contemporaneity, having influenced many philosophers and important philosophical currents of the 20th century, such as existentialism and the post-structuralism.
martinHeidegger: the German philosopher structured a critique of technique and established a new way of arriving at knowledge through a new philosophical structure.
TheodorAdornment: also German, the contemporary thinker questions fundamental political elements of twentieth-century society and elaborates a critique of the Enlightenment.
Jean-PaulSartre: one of the main theorists of existentialism, questioned the way human beings viewed existence.
SimoneinBeauvoir: existentialist and feminist philosopher, she elaborates the first feminist theories of the 20th century, based on what she called the feminine condition.
HannahArendt: German Jew persecuted by Nazism, she spoke about the human condition in the midst of global conflicts and deeply studied totalitarianism.
MichelFoucault: studied the new parameters of human and society coexistence through a biopolitical view, which are public policies that deal with the management and control of both life and death.
by Francisco Porfirio
Philosophy teacher
