Twentieth Century Philosophy

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.

However with the hindsight of time, the twentieth century will perhaps most be remembered as being the century in which Eastern philosophy penetrated into the Western consciousness. The first steps in this process were laid by Swami Vivekananda with his electrifying speech at the 1893 Parliament of World Religions, and further elaborated upon with the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda in the West. In India, the use of the philosophy of ahimsa or non-violence as a force for mass action by Mahatma Gandhi in the independence struggle captured the imagination of the world. However it was not until the sixties that, with many young people drawn to the lifestyle of Indian and Buddhist philosophies. Many teachers came from to be of service to in their quest for truth and to look for ways to adapt Eastern philosophy to western living; for example, the philosophy of one such teacher, Sri Chinmoy, aims to harmonise Western dynamism and Eastern poise in an integral balance.

In the later part of the twentieth century, Western philosophy was very much influenced by the work of one man whose ideas did not fit cleanly into analytic or continental philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, in particular, influenced much of the current generation of philosophers in its view that meaning lies not within concepts of language but rather the context in which it is used. In particular, it influenced a whole new branch of the philosophy of science led by Paul Feyerabend and Richard Rorty which viewed science as a sociological community interaction.

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The author, Shane Magee, has a Ph.D in particle physics, but has been interested in philosophy all his life. He is a member of the Sri Chinmoy Centre, which espouses an integral philosophy combining Western dynamism with the ancient paths to stillness of the East.

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