Philosophy in the 1800's

Kant's philosophy stimulated various systems of thought in the 1800's, such as those of G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx of Germany. Hegel developed a theory of historical change called dialectic, in which the conflict of opposites results in the creation of a new unity and then its opposite. Hegel's theory was transformed by Marx into dialectical materialism. Marx believed that only material things are real. He stated that all ideas are built on an economic base. He believed that the dialectic of conflict between capitalists and industrial workers will lead to the establishment of communism, which he called socialism, as an economic and political system.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, was an atheist who proclaimed in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) that "God is dead."

Nietzsche meant that the idea of God had lost the power to motivate and discipline large masses of people. He believed that people would have to look to some other idea to guide their lives. Nietzsche predicted the evolution of the superman, who would be beyond the weakness of human beings and beyond the merely human appeals to morality.

He regarded such appeals as appeals to weakness, not strength. He felt that all behavior is based on the will to power--the desire of people to control others and their own passions. The superman would develop a new kind of perfection and excellence through the capacity to realize the will to power through strength, rather than weakness.

The dominant philosophy in England during the 1800's was utilitarianism, developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The utilitarians maintained that the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people is the test of right and wrong. They argued that all existing social institutions, especially law and government, must be transformed to satisfy the test of greatest happiness. In The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill wrote that the legal subordination of women to men ought to be replaced by "a principle of perfect equality". That idea was revolutionary in Mill's time.

Philosophy in the 1900's has seen five main movements predominate. Two of these movements, existentialism and phenomenology, have had their greatest influence in the countries on the mainland of western Europe. The three other movements, pragmatism, logical positivism, and philosophical analysis, have been influential chiefly in the United States and Great Britain.

Existentialism became influential in the mid-1900's. World War II (1939-1945) gave rise to widespread feelings of despair and of separation from the established order. These feelings led to the idea that people have to create their own values in a world in which traditional values no longer govern. Existentialism insists that choices have to be made arbitrarily by individuals, who thus create themselves, because there are no objective standards to determine choice. The most famous of the existentialist philosophers is the French author Jean-Paul Sartre.

Phenomenology was developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Husserl conceived the task of phenomenology, hence the task of philosophy, as describing phenomena--the objects of experience--accurately and independently of all assumptions derived from science. He thought that this activity would provide philosophic knowledge of reality.

Pragmatism, represented in the 1900's by William James and John Dewey of the United States, maintains knowledge is subordinate to action. The meaning and truth of ideas are determined by their relation to practice.

Logical positivism, developed in Vienna, Austria, in the 1920's, believes philosophy should analyze the logic of the language of science. It regards science as the only source of knowledge and claims metaphysics is meaningless. It bases this claim on the principle of verifiability, by which a statement is meaningful only if it can be verified by sense experience.

Logical positivism, based on modern developments in logic and an empiricism like Hume’s, was the joint result of English thinkers like Russell and an Austrian group called the Vienna circle, whose most influential member, Ludwig Wittgenstein, had been a student of Russell’s at Cambridge. The English and Austrian positivists and linguistic philosophers challenged any form of metaphysical thinking and insisted that something could be said to be true if (and only if) it could be verified by logical or scientific procedures. No metaphysical claim, they insisted, could meet this test.

Philosophical analysis generally tries to solve philosophic problems through analysis of language or concepts.Some versions of this philosophy attempt to show that traditional philosophic problems dissolve--that is, disappear--on proper analysis of the terms in which they are expressed. Other versions use linguistic analysis to throw light on, not dissolve, traditional philosophic problems. The most influential philosophers practicing philosophic analysis have been Bertrand Russell of England and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was born in Austria but studied and taught in England.