Continental Philosophy Essay

Georg W.F. Hegel was a German philosopher who with two other philosophers created German idealism. He influenced writers of widely varying positions, including his admirers and detractors where he discussed a relation between nature and freedom, immanence and transcendence, and the unification of these dualities without eliminating either pole or reducing it to the other. He is also the founder of Hegelianism where philosophy is defined as all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories according to his favorite motto, “the rational alone is real”. According to Hegel, his method in philosophy consisted of following out the triadic development in each concept and in each thing. Therefore, hoping that philosophy would not contradict experience but will give to the data of experience; the philosophical which is, the ultimately true explanation.

Hegel categorized his philosophies into four different groups, consisting of Philosophy of nature, the Philosophy of mind, the Philosophy of history and the Philosophy of absolute mind. Then we get into Continental philosophy where contemporary usage refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. The term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the late 20th century, who found it useful for referring to a range of thinkers and traditions that had been largely ignored or neglected by the analytic movement. In general characteristics, it is difficult to identify non-trivial claims that would be common to all the preceding philosophical movements. The term "continental philosophy," was first widely used by English-speaking philosophers to describe university courses in the 1970s, emerging as a collective name for the philosophies then widespread in France and Germany, such as phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. The term (its actual definition) can be found going back as early as 1840, in John Stuart Mill’s 1840 essay entitled Coleridge where he contrasts the Kantian-influenced thought of "Continental philosophy" and "Continental philosophers" with the English empiricism of Bentham and the 18th century generally. Meanwhile in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, Brentano, Husserl, and Reinach were developing a new philosophical method of their own, phenomenology. Heidegger took this phenomenological approach in new directions, and, after WWII, French philosophers led by Jean Paul Sartre developed Heidegger's ideas into a movement known as existentialism.

We now get into existentialism where philosophical movement which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them. Existentialism tends to focus on the question of human existence вЂ"

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