Philosophical Movements(philosophy, wiki, forked, Proteus)
A
philosophical movement is either the appearance or increased popularity of a specific school of
Philosophy, or a fairly broad but identifiable sea-change in philosophical thought on a particular subject. Major movements are often characterized with reference to the
nation,
language, or historical era in which they arose.
Talk of a philosophical movement can often function as a shorthand for talk of the views of a great number of different
philosophers (and others associated with philosophy, such as historians, artists, scientists and political figures). On the other hand, most philosophical movements in history consisted in a great number of individual thinkers who disagreed in various ways; it is often inaccurate and something of a caricature to treat any movement as consisting in followers of uniform opinion. More often the defining ideas of any philosophical movement are templates on which individual thinkers develop their own particular ideas.
Like specific doctrines and theories, movements are often given names with "ism" suffixes, but there are many
theories which also have "ism" names. What makes a movement identifiable and interesting as distinct from a specific theory is simply that a movement consists in a large flourishing of intellectual work on one or more ideas, in a fairly specifiable time and place.
Chronological Movements
- Platonic Realism
- Pythagoreanism
- Taoism
- Confucianism
- Zen Buddhism
- Stoicism
- Cynicism
- Neoplatonism
- The Renaissance itself, which aimed to revive Classical Greek and Roman ideas
- Rationalism, dominant on continental Europe following Descartes
- Empiricism, dominant in Britain following Hobbes
- The Enlightenment which drew attention to the importance of science and reason to human life
- French Materialism
- German Idealism, fifty years from Kant's major work through the death of Hegel
- Continental Philosophy
- Romanticism
- Utilitarianism -- Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill
- Marxism
- Nihilism
- Existentialism -- Soren Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre
- Phenomenology Sartre, Heidegger
- Logicism -- Gottlob Frege
- Logical Positivism (with the Vienna Circle, Logical Atomism (Russell), and Ideal Language (Wittgenstein))
- Analytic Philosophy -- Gottlob Frege, W. V. O. Quine
- Structuralism
- Modernism (more a movement in the arts, but worth noting for its connection with below)
- Post-Modernism
- Post-Structuralism
Wider Movements
Some movements, such as the
Renaissance and
Enlightenment, or
Romanticism, were broader cultural movements which happened to be characterised by fairly distinctive philosophical concerns. However, their spirit was by no means limited to
Philosophy, and were included works in
Art,
Music and
Literature.
Some content adapted from the Wikinfo article "Philosophical_movements" under the GNU Free Documentation License.
(last updated by Proteus, 6:07pm EDT - Wed, Aug 01 2007)
