page_title: Continental philosophy
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Continental philosophy / History
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of Martin Heidegger. Detail of a phototograph entitled&#160;: "W 134 Nr. 060678d - Hausen: Festakt, in der Reihe, Kultusminister Storz, Prof. Heidegger, Dichtel". Additional reference&#160;: Teilbestand W 134 (Neg. BaWü), Teil 1 - Fotosammlung Willy Pragher: Filmnegative Baden-Württemberg, Teil 1.
context_page_description: Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy includes German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and related branches of Western Marxism.
  It is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements, but the primary differentiation is objectivity, or the belief that the universe has a material reality regardless of whether humans exist or not, rejected by the continental heavyweights like Hegel in the Counter-Enlightenment, while analytic philosophy is rejection of the latter.
  The term continental philosophy, like analytic philosophy, lacks clear definition and may mark merely a family resemblance across disparate philosophical views.
context_section_description: The history of continental philosophy (taken in the narrower sense of "late modern/contemporary continental philosophy") is usually thought to begin with German idealism. Led by figures like Fichte, Schelling, and later Hegel, German idealism developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s and was closely linked with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment.  Besides the central figures listed above, important contributors to German idealism also included Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and Friedrich Schleiermacher.
  As the institutional roots of "continental philosophy" in many cases directly descend from those of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl has always been a canonical figure in continental philosophy. Nonetheless, Husserl is also a respected subject of study in the analytic tradition. Husserl's notion of a noema, the non-psychological content of thought, his correspondence with Gottlob Frege, and his investigations into the nature of logic continue to generate interest among analytic philosophers.
  J. G. Merquior argued that a distinction between analytic and continental philosophies can be first clearly identified with Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose wariness of science and elevation of intuition paved the way for existentialism. Merquior wrote: "the most prestigious philosophizing in France took a very dissimilar path [from the Anglo-Germanic analytic schools]. One might say it all began with Henri Bergson."
  An illustration of some important differences between analytic and continental styles of philosophy can be found in Rudolf Carnap's "Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language" (1932; "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache"), a paper some observers have described as particularly polemical. Carnap's paper argues that Heidegger's lecture "What Is Metaphysics?" violates logical syntax to create nonsensical pseudo-statements. Moreover, Carnap claimed that many German metaphysicians of the era were similar to Heidegger in writing statements that were syntactically meaningless.
  With the rise of Nazism, many of Germany's philosophers, especially those of Jewish descent or leftist or liberal political sympathies (such as many in the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School), fled to the English-speaking world.  Those philosophers who remained—if they remained in academia at all—had to reconcile themselves to Nazi control of the universities. Others, such as Martin Heidegger, among the most prominent German philosophers to stay in Germany, developed a diplomatic relationship with Nazism when it came to power.
caption: Martin Heidegger
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