ទស្សនវិជ្ជា: ទស្សនវិជ្ជាសតវត្សទី២០

ទស្សនវិជ្ជាសតវត្សទី២០ 

Within the last century, philosophy has increasingly become a professional discipline practiced within universities, like other academic disciplines. Accordingly, it has become less general and more specialized. In the view of one prominent recent historian: "Philosophy has become a highly organized discipline, done by specialists primarily for other specialists. The number of philosophers has exploded, the volume of publication has swelled, and the subfields of serious philosophical investigation have multiplied. Not only is the broad field of philosophy today far too vast to be embraced by one mind, something similar is true even of many highly specialized subfields."Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, p. 463.

In the English-speaking world, analytic philosophy became the dominant school for much of the 20th century. In the first half of the century, it was a cohesive school, shaped strongly by logical positivism, united by the notion that philosophical problems could and should be solved by attention to logic and language. The pioneering work of Bertrand Russell was a model for the early development of analytic philosophy, moving from a rejection of the idealism dominant in late 19th century British philosophy to an neo-Humean empiricism, strengthened by the conceptual resources of modern mathematical logic.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Bertrand Russell", 1 May 2003: "Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy. [...] he is regularly credited with being one of the most important logicians of the twentieth century."Paul Edwards (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7 (Macmillan, 1967), p. 239: "Russell has exercised an influence on the course of Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century second to that of no other individual."Thomas Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 376: "[...] the three greatest European philosophers of the twentieth century—Heidegger, Russell, and Wittgenstein." In the latter half of the 20th century, analytic philosophy diffused into a wide variety of disparate philosophical views, only loosely united by historical lines of influence and a self-identified commitment to clarity and rigor. The post-war transformation of the analytic program led in two broad directions: on one hand, an interest in ordinary language as a way of avoiding or redescribing traditional philosophical problems, and on the other, a more thoroughgoing naturalism that sought to dissolve the puzzles of modern philosophy via the results of the natural sciences (such as cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology). The shift in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, from a view congruent with logical positivism to a therapeutic dissolution of traditional philosophy as a linguistic misunderstanding of normal forms of life, was the most influential version of the first direction in analytic philosophy.Avrum Stroll, Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 252: "More than any other analytic philosopher, [Wittgenstein] has changed the thinking of a whole generation.""Wittgenstein, Ludwig" in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and regarded by some as the most important since Immanuel Kant." The later work of Russell and the philosophy of W.V.O. Quine are influential exemplars of the naturalist approach dominant in the second half of the 20th century.Thomas Baldwin, Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 90: "[Quine] has been, without question, the most influential American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century."Peter Hylton, "Quine", in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Quine's work has been extremely influential and has done much to shape the course of philosophy in the second-half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first."Andrew Bailey, First Philosophy: Knowledge and Reality (Broadview Press, 2004), p. 274: "Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) was uncontroversially one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century."Anthony Kenny, Philosophy in the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 64: "After Wittgenstein's death many people regarded W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000) as the doyen of Anglophone philosophy." But the diversity of analytic philosophy from the 1970s onward defies easy generalization: the naturalism of Quine and his epigoni was in some precincts superseded by a "new metaphysics" of possible worlds, as in the influential work of David Lewis.Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy : "David Lewis (1941–2001) was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, decision theory, epistemology, meta-ethics and aesthetics. In most of these fields he is essential reading; in many of them he is among the most important figures of recent decades. And this list leaves out his two most significant contributions."John Perry, Michael Bratman, John Martin Fischer (eds.), Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 302: "David Lewis (1941–2001) was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century." Recently, the experimental philosophy movement has sought to reappraise philosophical problems through social science research techniques.

On continental Europe, no single school or temperament enjoyed dominance. The flight of the logical positivists from central Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, however, diminished philosophical interest in natural science, and an emphasis on the humanities, broadly construed, figures prominently in what is usually called "continental philosophy". 20th century movements such as phenomenology, existentialism, modern hermeneutics, critical theory, structuralism, and poststructuralism are included within this loose category.  The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, sought to study consciousness as experienced from a first-person perspective,"Edmund Husserl", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Edmund Husserl was the principal founder of phenomenology—and thus one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.""Husserl, Edmund", in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "he is arguably one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century." while Martin Heidegger drew on the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to propose an unconventional existential approach to ontology.Raymond Geuss, in Thomas Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 497: "Heidegger is by a wide margin the single most influential philosopher of the twentieth century.""Heidegger, Martin", in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Martin Heidegger is widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century".