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A Brief History of 20th Century Western Philosophy
During the 20th century, our understanding of the world was transformed thanks to the likes of relativity, quantum physics, molecular biology, chaos theory and computer science. Likewise, our comprehension of ourselves developed dramatically courtesy of theories such as behaviourism, structuralism and cognitive science.
The history of Western philosophy in the 20th century broadly reflects all of this change and diversity, but at an abstract level. Part of its story is of the contrast between two conflicting traditions: the analytic and the continental. In the analytic tradition, there are thinkers such as Russell, Quine and Davidson, who, among other things, aim to show how semantic meaning fits into the scientifically conceived physical world. This often goes hand in hand with the idea that social progress must be in part scientific. However, within this analytic branch, there are several counter-narratives, such as the work of the pragmatists and the ordinary language philosophers, who resist the idea that language must conform to an idealized scientific picture, and who often point towards a conception of social progress that is not scientific.
In sharp contrast, much continental thought tries to characterise the human condition through descriptions of experience as such in ways that are pre-scientific. This applies especially to thinkers in the phenomenological and existentialist traditions, such as Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. Branching out from this, hermeneutics examines the art of interpreting texts, especially with regard to the historical and linguistic assumptions that make interpretation possible. Poststructuralism constitutes largely a rejection of these traditions that emphasizes the shifting relations between signifiers within a whole system and which defies all attempts to seek absolutes beyond those relations.
In this illuminating overview, Professor Garrett Thomson surveys the field, considering the work and influence of 29 major thinkers representing logical atomism and logical positivism (including Russell and Wittgenstein), analytic philosophy (including Quine, Davidson, Rawls), phenomenology and existentialism (including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre), hermeneutics (including Gadamer and Habermas) and post-structuralism (including Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze). Also examined are some recent thinkers including Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor. The field is clearly presented with a short biography of the major figures followed by their thoughts and views. With over 20 books to his credit, Professor Thomson is an experienced presenter of his subject, conveying his knowledge expertly while injecting his personal enthusiasm for the challenges of 20th century Western philosophy. The text is read with clarity by James Gillies.
The history of Western philosophy in the 20th century broadly reflects all of this change and diversity, but at an abstract level. Part of its story is of the contrast between two conflicting traditions: the analytic and the continental. In the analytic tradition, there are thinkers such as Russell, Quine and Davidson, who, among other things, aim to show how semantic meaning fits into the scientifically conceived physical world. This often goes hand in hand with the idea that social progress must be in part scientific. However, within this analytic branch, there are several counter-narratives, such as the work of the pragmatists and the ordinary language philosophers, who resist the idea that language must conform to an idealized scientific picture, and who often point towards a conception of social progress that is not scientific.
In sharp contrast, much continental thought tries to characterise the human condition through descriptions of experience as such in ways that are pre-scientific. This applies especially to thinkers in the phenomenological and existentialist traditions, such as Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. Branching out from this, hermeneutics examines the art of interpreting texts, especially with regard to the historical and linguistic assumptions that make interpretation possible. Poststructuralism constitutes largely a rejection of these traditions that emphasizes the shifting relations between signifiers within a whole system and which defies all attempts to seek absolutes beyond those relations.
In this illuminating overview, Professor Garrett Thomson surveys the field, considering the work and influence of 29 major thinkers representing logical atomism and logical positivism (including Russell and Wittgenstein), analytic philosophy (including Quine, Davidson, Rawls), phenomenology and existentialism (including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre), hermeneutics (including Gadamer and Habermas) and post-structuralism (including Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze). Also examined are some recent thinkers including Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor. The field is clearly presented with a short biography of the major figures followed by their thoughts and views. With over 20 books to his credit, Professor Thomson is an experienced presenter of his subject, conveying his knowledge expertly while injecting his personal enthusiasm for the challenges of 20th century Western philosophy. The text is read with clarity by James Gillies.
- GenresPhilosophyAudiobook
11 pages, Audible Audio
Published April 9, 2022
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February 8, 2026
It took me a while to listen to this on Audible, but all in all, Garrett Thomson's lengthy investigation into 20th century philosophy was worth the investment of time.
Thomson's chapters about individual philosophers and their thought is an excellent frame to hang his narrative on, and that narrative actually beings with Nietzche's late 19th century pronouncement that "God is dead."
There are at least two ways to interpret that revolutionary statement. The first is that the idea of some absolute point from which all of humanity can be seen and judged is simply wrong. The complexity of the modern world, and its many religions -- all with strengths and weaknesses -- made it clear there was no single path to moral truth. (Nietzsche anticipated Einstein's physical notion of relativity by some decades.)
The second is, given that there are no moral absolutes, that meaning is elusive. The meaning of life, of course, becomes unmoored without a tie to an unquestioned received wisdom, but the meaning of such simple things and words and sentences all fall under attack by the idea that there are a multiplicity of viewpoints, and thus a multiplicity of acceptable meanings of even simple concepts.
So Thomson begins his book by considering the problem of what a word actually means, first probed in depth by Gottlob Frege. As always, the devil is in the details, and Thomson's discussion of the weaknesses of correspondence theory, and the difficulty of classifying thoughts and feelings as objects, shows this problem is far from easy to solve.
The next step is phenonmenalism, which Edmund Husserl proposed, in part, to avoid the issue of whether words referred to "real" things. Phenomenalism focuses on how humans experience the world, not how the world might actually be, and deals with the mental phenomena that make up human reality.
This too is complex and fraught with philosophical landmines, and one way out came from Ferdiand de Saussure's work on language. Sausurre proposed that meaning was actually unrelated to whatever reality might be, and was a product of signs (such as words and symbols) and their relation to each other. He called this theory "structuralism," and it said that meaning came from the overall structures of language, not necessarily the individual words themselves. The relations between the words gave them meaning -- the difference, say, between love and hate -- and so the structure was what was important to study.
Though none of these three major movements came to any real conclusion, they do reveal much about how human beings deal with the world they are thrown into at birth, and how easy it is to be misled by what seems so substantial. (Of course, few philosophical problems are ever solved. The issue of universals, which bedeviled Plato and medieval philosophers, has simply been shunted aside rather than resolved.)
And do not think that these abstruse musings have no meaning. Critical theory emerged in Germany in the early 1930s as a critique of capitalism, and with the horrors of the Holocaust, it cast doubt on the value of rationalism and reason. If rational societies could justify genocide, critical theory argued, then what is the value of rationalism? And what is the value of all the traditions that have brought us to this point?
Now, in 2026, nearly a hundred years since philosophers in Frankfurt debated this topic, a branch of critical theory, critical race theory, has become a flashpoint in American politics and the very practical educational process.
The wheels of philosophy grind slowly, it is true, but they do grind exceedingly small.
Thomson's chapters about individual philosophers and their thought is an excellent frame to hang his narrative on, and that narrative actually beings with Nietzche's late 19th century pronouncement that "God is dead."
There are at least two ways to interpret that revolutionary statement. The first is that the idea of some absolute point from which all of humanity can be seen and judged is simply wrong. The complexity of the modern world, and its many religions -- all with strengths and weaknesses -- made it clear there was no single path to moral truth. (Nietzsche anticipated Einstein's physical notion of relativity by some decades.)
The second is, given that there are no moral absolutes, that meaning is elusive. The meaning of life, of course, becomes unmoored without a tie to an unquestioned received wisdom, but the meaning of such simple things and words and sentences all fall under attack by the idea that there are a multiplicity of viewpoints, and thus a multiplicity of acceptable meanings of even simple concepts.
So Thomson begins his book by considering the problem of what a word actually means, first probed in depth by Gottlob Frege. As always, the devil is in the details, and Thomson's discussion of the weaknesses of correspondence theory, and the difficulty of classifying thoughts and feelings as objects, shows this problem is far from easy to solve.
The next step is phenonmenalism, which Edmund Husserl proposed, in part, to avoid the issue of whether words referred to "real" things. Phenomenalism focuses on how humans experience the world, not how the world might actually be, and deals with the mental phenomena that make up human reality.
This too is complex and fraught with philosophical landmines, and one way out came from Ferdiand de Saussure's work on language. Sausurre proposed that meaning was actually unrelated to whatever reality might be, and was a product of signs (such as words and symbols) and their relation to each other. He called this theory "structuralism," and it said that meaning came from the overall structures of language, not necessarily the individual words themselves. The relations between the words gave them meaning -- the difference, say, between love and hate -- and so the structure was what was important to study.
Though none of these three major movements came to any real conclusion, they do reveal much about how human beings deal with the world they are thrown into at birth, and how easy it is to be misled by what seems so substantial. (Of course, few philosophical problems are ever solved. The issue of universals, which bedeviled Plato and medieval philosophers, has simply been shunted aside rather than resolved.)
And do not think that these abstruse musings have no meaning. Critical theory emerged in Germany in the early 1930s as a critique of capitalism, and with the horrors of the Holocaust, it cast doubt on the value of rationalism and reason. If rational societies could justify genocide, critical theory argued, then what is the value of rationalism? And what is the value of all the traditions that have brought us to this point?
Now, in 2026, nearly a hundred years since philosophers in Frankfurt debated this topic, a branch of critical theory, critical race theory, has become a flashpoint in American politics and the very practical educational process.
The wheels of philosophy grind slowly, it is true, but they do grind exceedingly small.
August 12, 2024
Compliments Will Durant Story of Philosophy as well, lots of discussion of language, be ready.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews