Publisher's Synopsis
In this history of philosophy during the course of the 20th century, the author reviews the discipline's divergent and dramatic course, showing that its greatest figures were deeply affected by the events of their time. From Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose famous "Tractatus" was actually composed in the trenches during World War I, to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the one a converted Jew who found himself barred from public life with Hitler's coming to power, the other a member of the Nazi party who later refused to repudiate German war crimes; from Bertrand Russell, whose lifelong pacifism led him to turn from logic and mathematics to social and moral questions, and Jean Paul Sartre, who made philosophy an occasion for direct and personal political engagement, to Rudolf Carnap, a committed socialist, and Karl Popper, a resolute opponent of Communism; from the Vienna Circle and the Frankfurt School to the contemporary work or philosophers, as variously minded as Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas adn Hilary Putnam - the thinking of these philosophers and scores of others should be understood within the context of the times in which they lived.;Delcampagne's approach enables him to treat the history of 20th-century philosophy in a unified manner, seeing its two major branches as complementary rather as unalterably opposed. He traces the roots of Anglo-American and Continental philosophy to their common source in the work of Frege and the late-19th-century revolt against Kant, and gives a comprehensive account of their subsequent development.
